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Soooo, Chia farming. If I read the article right, you're not actually storing anything useful, like copies of the Library of Congress or SciHub or, say, anythin

Soooo, Chia farming. If I read the article right, you're not actually storing anything useful, like copies of the Library of Congress or SciHub or, say, anything that might be useful to humanity in the long run. You're just storing a pile of randomish numbers? Bitcoin, et. al., sounds like a scam to me, but Chia farming sounds like next-level stupid.

supergirl 5y ago
correct, you're storing random bits. there is filecoin that actually stores things, but it has its own problems
skjoldr 5y ago
Ethereum Swarm is the saner model where you rent out your disk space for other people and get paid for it in ETH. It's still in beta tho.
leppr 5y ago
Storing data has low cost versus continuous computing. This is what makes Chia mining have less external impact. Unused storage space can be used to make a little bit of money. If the "useful" data you're talking about has nobody willing to pay for its storage, is it really that useful? That's where the economical argument is with Chia: rewards are already low, and will get lower with time. So if some data has any kind of value, then there's no incentive to mine Chia instead of storing this data. Just store the SciHub library and rake in donations. Hetzner decided there's more value in reserving their hardware for other usages. If the incentive to mine starts getting very big, then they can just mine themselves. From a blockchain-security PoV this is the same as customers-managed mining. Crypto mining incentive mechanisms are working as intended here, so as a cryptocurrency enthusiast I don't consider this development negative. It's easy to look at something new, the use of it you don't understand, and instantly conclude it's stupid. "Why make data use up x10 more space by encrypting it? You should just store it in a secure location to begin with! Disk encryption is a scam!". "Why waste resources to secure some distributed ledger when you could just use Visa and Mastercard? Cryptocurrencies are a scam!"
reincarnate0x14 5y ago
Chia is basically taking a cryptographic proof that would normally take a long time to run, and running them in advance and storing them in a sort of a backwards space/time tradeoff. The farmers keep collections of millions or billions of these in hope that they'll have a few winning lottery tickets over time. If you accept the premise of cryptocurrencies at all, it's not as stupid as the pure proof-of-works, which essentially require endless scaling to eat any improved capability and efficiency. Big if there though.

supergirl 5y ago

correct, you're storing random bits. there is filecoin that actually stores things, but it has its own problems

skjoldr 5y ago

Ethereum Swarm is the saner model where you rent out your disk space for other people and get paid for it in ETH. It's still in beta tho.

leppr 5y ago

Storing data has low cost versus continuous computing. This is what makes Chia mining have less external impact. Unused storage space can be used to make a little bit of money. If the "useful" data you're talking about has nobody willing to pay for its storage, is it really that useful? That's where the economical argument is with Chia: rewards are already low, and will get lower with time. So if some data has any kind of value, then there's no incentive to mine Chia instead of storing this data. Just store the SciHub library and rake in donations. Hetzner decided there's more value in reserving their hardware for other usages. If the incentive to mine starts getting very big, then they can just mine themselves. From a blockchain-security PoV this is the same as customers-managed mining. Crypto mining incentive mechanisms are working as intended here, so as a cryptocurrency enthusiast I don't consider this development negative. It's easy to look at something new, the use of it you don't understand, and instantly conclude it's stupid. "Why make data use up x10 more space by encrypting it? You should just store it in a secure location to begin with! Disk encryption is a scam!". "Why waste resources to secure some distributed ledger when you could just use Visa and Mastercard? Cryptocurrencies are a scam!"

reincarnate0x14 5y ago

Chia is basically taking a cryptographic proof that would normally take a long time to run, and running them in advance and storing them in a sort of a backwards space/time tradeoff. The farmers keep collections of millions or billions of these in hope that they'll have a few winning lottery tickets over time. If you accept the premise of cryptocurrencies at all, it's not as stupid as the pure proof-of-works, which essentially require endless scaling to eat any improved capability and efficiency. Big if there though.