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Scaleway announces measures against abusive Chia plotting and farming
- crazypython 5y agoIs it possible to optimize plotting to use I/O less and RAM more? Or is it an inherent boundary of the protocol like energy use is in PoW?
- wmf 5y agoIf you have ~300 GB of RAM you should be able to plot directly in RAM.
- crazypython 5y agoImagine a cloud provider has 300GB RAM. What if they plotted and let other people later download the plot?
- wmf 5y agoI think bandwidth charges kill that idea.
- crazypython 5y agoOn AWS, yes. On Scaleway and Hetzner, there is unmetered 100Mbps bandwidth. On Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean, there is a 1-month 1TB limit.
- r1ch 5y agoThe reference implementation is Python, so there's lots of room to optimize. I wonder if you can eventually build an ASIC that replaces the disk based lookup with in memory calculations of the same data.
- crazypython 5y agoCan you send a link? I'd like to help.
- nessex 5y agoMost of the work happens in C++[1] [1] https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiapos https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiapos
- meepmorp 5y ago> As you can see, (the scale is in Petabytes), the space used is growing uncontrollably, and has already reached 7 Exabytes. Judging by the graph in the article, it was 1 exabyte in late April, under a month ago. Wow.
- scohesc 5y agoThere's been an absolute metric crap-ton of interest generated since the media has started picking it up and taking about it 2-3 weeks ago. It seems like it's one of the first crypto offerings that relies not on constant CPU/GPU usage, but just proof of "storage" from what I understand. Very interesting.
- Vespasian 5y agoWho buys up all the farmed coins on these new cryptocurrencies. It is really just speculation fever?
- guimoz 5y agoYes. And miners tend to hold their coins so the supply remains moderately low. A bit like the OPEC.
- hn8788 5y agoI came across a subreddit, I forget its name though, thats sole purpose was pumping up new cryptocurrencies, hoping it would catch the attention of casual crypto investors. They'd pick a day to sell off whatever cryptocurrency they had pumped up, then repeat it was some other no-name cryptocurrency.
- bobsmooth 5y agoSeems fair.
- mikl 5y agoI’m sure all the crypto fans are lining up around the block to tell us that their pet technology doesn’t waste valuable resources, it just uses storage that would otherwise have gone unused, as they do with Bitcoin and electricity.
- liaukovv 5y agoComputational resources too Actually pretty close to what some scifi writers envision(The Golden Oecumene by Wright comes to mind)
- scohesc 5y agoI think it's funny how the world as a whole just simply moves the problem (excess resource usage for something a lot of people have deemed 'excessive' like bitcoin mining) from one type of resource to another. Now we're going to see storage costs skyrocket, which will (hopefully not) affect cloud storage providers, datacenters, etc. etc. etc.
- throwaway894345 5y agoThat would be a bummer, but if it doesn't exacerbate the energy/co2 problem I consider it a net benefit.
- kevingadd 5y agoManufacturing SSDs and platter drives is definitely not carbon neutral. Let's not even get into the problems with rare earth material extraction...
- throwaway894345 5y agoIn order to be considered a net benefit, it only needs to emit less carbon than compute-based mining. It doesn't need to be carbon neutral (and indeed, I don't think anyone posited that it was).
- tpetry 5y agoHetzner has forbidden Chia yesterday too because the disk are used a lot when chia farming.
- kevingadd 5y agoTechnically plotting is the really bad part, farming mostly just occupies storage and uses a bit of CPU. Not that I personally am a fan of either, but plotting is the destructive part and then you 'farm' the completed plot forever and that can be done on inexpensive spinning rust drives by a cheap PC.
- meltedcapacitor 5y agoCan you "plot" at the chip factory (producing some sort of pre-plotted ROM) or does it have to be updated in some way?
- guimoz 5y agoA plot is basically a 100GB file (or file) that is associated with your public key. You can move it around how you want. Many people are creating them on machines with nvme disk and then they are copied over a network storage somewhere else.
- duskwuff 5y agoThe plots are each unique, and are too large (hundreds of GB) to represent as a ROM.
- rfrerebe 5y agoYou can see what remains of their cheap STORE servers: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/pricing/?family=STORE https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/pricing/?family=STORE
- AlexCoventry 5y ago> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Woah, really?
- ev1 5y agoYes. The creation of the plot will eat through SSD TBW.
- kevingadd 5y agoYes, presumably as a measure to make it harder to scale the plotting process (to make it more "fair"), it apparently does a ton of reads and writes across the whole region being plotted, so it will quickly exhaust the total number of write cycles available on the drive. A cheaper drive will be effectively destroyed (high quality drives can survive more write cycles, so they're comparatively okay.) I would have assumed it just linearly computed the whole plot to be farmed, but presumably that would make it vulnerable to some sort of attack where you create a "winning" plot on demand. You could theoretically plot on a RAMdisk to avoid this problem, but the necessary amount of RAM would be incredibly expensive, so it's unlikely that many people will do it. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4
- scohesc 5y agoFrom what I understand, newer consumer level SSDs are designed to have a lower TBW (TeraBytes Written) - mostly because any reasonable consumer doesn't write terabytes of data to their SSDs in any decent length of time. Enterprise/Higher end "GaMeR" SSDs have higher TBW ratings - I believe 1TB FireCuda Model NVMe SSDs have something insane like a 1800 TBW rating when I was looking a couple weeks back. These above mentioned consumer drives, when written to in massive amounts (I believe even the lower sized Chia plots thrash the SSD to the tune of at least a couple terabytes of write usage) cause it to degrade at a significantly higher rate. Long story short, consumer SSDs aren't designed for super high write tasks, while enterprise and higher-end ones are.
- floatingatoll 5y agoWhat is the expansion of the acronym “GaMeR”? I’ve not seen it before and I want to be sure I understand.
- yashasolutions 5y agoTIL people are competing for who's got the biggest hard drive...
- awat 5y agoI’m really not one for conspiracies so I won’t go that far but If I was a drive manufacturer this would certainly be my favorite cryptocurrency.
- supergirl 5y agois it not feasible to plot on AWS? would be interesting if they are also forced to ban this.
- xuki 5y agoAWS/Azure/GCP are significantly more expensive compare to these providers.
- scohesc 5y agoFrom what I understand, the network/algorithm is designed to prevent this from happening - either due to massively huge egress costs (I think you need to 'upload' the whole plot to the network after you have a verified proof), or for sheer data storage cases (some farmers/miners have tens of petabytes of plots already - i wonder how much that would cost to store monthly?)
- benmanns 5y agoYou don't have to upload the plot after you have a verified proof. You do have to pay to store it, though, and that can be pretty expensive on AWS. If you just plot on AWS and store the plots elsewhere to save storage costs, you have to pay outbound charges on the plot files.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Mooty 5y agoDid some, transfer costs beetween instances that serves as plot generators are f** expensive. You need TB of data transfers, for example 15TB to transfer on the internet is somewhere around 1500$.
- netflixandkill 5y agoThis is mostly a problem for low-cost hosting that had some implied assumptions about how heavily used various components would be relative to the rest.
- jakedata 5y agoI read the headline as China rather than Chia and was wondering what China was plotting to farm now. Frankly it was much more interesting than Chia bad, no Chia for you.
- HideousKojima 5y agoI initially thought it was some agricultural issue similar to palm oil farming but for chia seeds.
- 1-more 5y agoExtreme cutting-the-last-tree-on-Rapa-Nui vibes
- qbasic_forever 5y agoSomebody needs to invent a coin that works on proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions, or proof-of-global-poverty-reduction and do some real good for the world.
- c1sc0 5y agoThat’s actually pretty simple if you can live with centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased. Then again ... what’s the point of putting that on a blockchain?
- throwaway894345 5y ago> Then again ... what’s the point of putting that on a blockchain? Marketing. :p > That’s actually pretty simple if you can live with centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased. We have this today, but "just certify" does a lot of work here. It's really hard to certify CO2 offsets in many cases (e.g., it's tough to verify that the trees someone plants weren't going to be planted anyway or that they will live to their expected potential and not get burned down prematurely).
- dragontamer 5y agoWhenever you plant a tree, do the following. 1. Take a picture of the tree 2. Burn the tree down. 3. Create NFT of the picture of the tree burning down. 4. Use the NFT of the picture of the tree to certify the CO2 offset. Inspiration from: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56335948 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56335948
- StavrosK 5y agoI don't understand, the offset of a burnt tree is 0. I get that it's a joke, I just don't understand what the joke is.
- dragontamer 5y ago
- vineyardmike 5y agoCan anyone explain a simple explanation of how chia works? I tried reading the White Paper ("green paper"), but its a little dense and math-y. What is plotting? How does farming a plot work? Edit: Why do people plot with SSDs? Is there a speed element to it?
- zamalek 5y agoFarming: you hold massive (101GB) bingo cards of mathematical proofs on your hard drive. When you receive a challenge, you first do a pre-filter on your bingo cards to see which of them could contain a proof. Within that filtered list, you find the closest proofs. The peer with the closest proof available wins the challenge and [currently] gets 2XCH. Plotting: you fill your free space with bingo cards. You need 300-400GB of free temporary space and TBs of writes in that space. This uses a lot of compute and eats SSDs for breakfast. Once you have filled your space (assuming you don't go out and buy more disks), you can stop plotting. This is where the claimed "greenness" of Chia comes into play: you eventually stop using compute resources. Of course, there are whales who are adding drives to their servers daily.
- popotamonga 5y agoI have 512GB Ram, cant it be used for plotting without ssd?
- zamalek 5y agoIt can be, just set up a RAM disk and use that as your temporary drive. It's exactly what I'm doing to fill my tiny 12TB Raspberry Pi farm. Your plotting rate won't be competitive (plotting in parallel on NVMEs turns out to be much faster).
- lozaning 5y agoYeah, I plot an a DL580 with 512GB. Other than not having to worry about write durability there's not much gained though. GB per GB my ram drive is faster, but i can plot in parallel on my NVME drive because it's considerably larger.
- ksec 5y agoSome people think Chia is so much better because of it uses SSD / Storage rather than GPU. I think this could be far worse. Not everyone needs a GPGPU, but everyone need NAND and SSD. And it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see something similar to chip shortage. The DRAM Fab which could be quickly retooled to NAND will be part of this equation as well. This is not good.
- dheera 5y agoChia isn't worth farming anymore. I have a pile of old spare 512GB SSDs and it looks like I would able to make something like $2/day. Not even enough for a coffee. Same with Ethereum. Tried to mine with my Titan V. 31 MH/s. Also not even enough for a coffee. This is meaningless, and cryptocurrencies are effectively centralized around mining farms with ASICs.
- ipsum2 5y agoI don't believe that an ASIC has been developed for Ethereum, but I'm not too familiar with cryptocurrency.
- jl2718 5y agoLong ago. See the hash rate chart and guess when that might have happened. Hint: long before they were offered for sale.
- devwastaken 5y agoThat's not how chia rewards you though. It's a lottery, and though chia may be around 1000 or so right now it could massively increase in the future. Current projections are something like 3-4 months to get a single reward. But if you could make potentially an extra 50K a year with some harddrives that's not a bad deal.
- hellow0rldz 5y agoBitCoin mining is also a lottery. I could stumble on a good hash using my own CPU. But the odds are in favour of the farms with ASICs.
- Thaxll 5y ago"Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks" wow.
- jl2718 5y ago> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks I need to look into this more, but I think this is an implementation issue. It should buffer in RAM to require only one write pass. Edit: I was wrong. They set a minimum k that wouldn’t easily fit in ram.
- VectorLock 5y agoNow you just need terabytes of RAM.
- mvanaltvorst 5y agoYou need a relatively large amount of storage space for plotting, more than most RAM disks. It has proven to be more cost effective to consume SSD's than to use slower HDD's or a RAM disk.
- deepserket 5y agoit is possible, the problem is just that you need around 240GiB of temporary memory
- cookguyruffles 5y agoAny idea why the minimum plot size needs to be so damn huge? Really killed the attractiveness of the whole scheme for me
- retzkek 5y agoIf the plot were smaller there's the risk that someone could calculate plots "on the fly" within the 30-second claim window, thus reducing Chia to proof-of-work (or even breaking it entirely? the "green" paper [1] is a bit too dense for me). It's expected and planned that k will have to increase to 33 in a few years to stay ahead. [1]: https://www.chia.net/assets/ChiaGreenPaper.pdf https://www.chia.net/assets/ChiaGreenPaper.pdf
- hellow0rldz 5y agoNot sure how this is a problem since I assumed most cloud providers severely control and throttle IO.
- jude- 5y agoProof of Space is just Proof of Work by another means. Honestly, I'd rather just have (electric) PoW -- at least the energy source could be green, and any green energy capacity built out for PoW can be repurposed.
- AlexandrB 5y agoI'm sure eventually we'll see articles about the amount of garbage produced by Chia. I'm imagining pallets of dead SSDs.
- wmf 5y agoChia plotting is forbidden on all SSD and NVMe powered instances Translation: Scaleway didn't take SSD wear into account when designing their cloud. Chia farming is allowed on Scaleway Object Storage providing prior request has been both made and authorized by our sales team Translation: They can't expand their object storage fast enough to keep up with demand.
- celsoazevedo 5y ago> Translation: Scaleway didn't take SSD wear into account when designing their cloud. I don't think many cloud providers expect all their disks to fail every 1-3 months, which is what happens when you mine Chia on a SSD/NVMe.
- viraptor 5y agoYup, all cloud (well, all rental) business relies on rented resources to not be 100% utilised. Oversubscription is how they can offer prices cheaper than buying the resource yourself.
- cbdumas 5y agoPerhaps the "paperclip maximizer" doomsday scenario was right in was right in its broad strokes but just wrong about the agents involved? They were worried about a super-competent AI that burns resources producing low-utility widgets. In fact we have created an system (a combination of societal incentive structures and technological tools) that burns resources producing low-utility pseudo-random numbers.
- Nullabillity 5y agoHasn't the paperclip optimizer always been a euphemism for capitalism?
- AlexandrB 5y agoEven so bitcoin takes it to its logical extreme. You put valuable resources in one end and get money out the other side. In between, no useful work is done. It's the essence of capitalism without any of the beneficial side effects we've come to expect.
- robocat 5y agoGold mining is similar, although obviously not to the same extreme. Only 8% of the output is used industrially. https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-industry-sector-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... So gold mining is only 90% waste, whereas Bitcoin mining gets close to 100% waste. Then again, perhaps printed dollars could perhaps also be considered highly wasteful?
- sneak 5y agoNo. The fable long predates the current anticapitalism trend. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
- imtringued 5y agoNo, it's purely about AIs and the control problem. The problem boils down to "How can I control superior AIs through mere power of inferior humans?". The assumption is that the superhuman nature means there is no way disable a superhuman AI because deactivation will not fulfill its cost function and therefore must be avoided at all costs, the superhuman AI will always outsmart humans and prevent deactivation, the same way a skilled soldier will always beat an untrained civilian in combat. We have solved it for humans by accepting that the victor gets to lead humanity. Can we accept AI rule? Probably not.
- yoink32 5y agothe time to farm chia was three months ago
- hogFeast 5y agoYou couldn't farm it three months ago. Mainnet opened in mid-March.
- imhoguy 5y agoTo me the only explanation of this fad (or scam) is pure greed. That information smog producing period of time will be recalled in history books like the coal race with smog cities of early XX century. Useful Proof of Storage cryptos like Siacoin or Filecoin should be more incentivised. They store meaningful data.
- gok 5y ago> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Ok Chia is stupid but this means that you are not pricing your SSD I/O properly.
- kelp 5y agoThis reminds me of how Steve Jobs would talk about the need for liberal arts influence in technology. I feel like so much of this blockchain and cryptocurrency stuff is made purely looking at the tech, with either no thought to the actual incentives involved, or a total misunderstanding of them.
- killingtime74 5y agoThere’s no misunderstanding, people are naturally greedy and will try to get away with as much as possible
- rsynnott 5y ago> This reminds me of how Steve Jobs would talk about the need for liberal arts influence in technology. I mean, in this case, you really just need engineering (in the traditional sense) influence. Engineering as a discipline covers considering this sort of thing.
- Rodeoclash 5y agoIf you were an alien species worried about the rise of humans, you couldn't invent a better technology than crypto currency to cause us to kill ourselves.
- bArray 5y agoI wonder if this is why they are also phasing out their C1 bare metal instances - other than being old I bet it would be easy to burn through those disks for Chia coin.
- Molly666 5y agoMost of all I'm angry that everyone calls chia coin a green coin, although this is far from the case and there are more eco-friendly altenratives. For example, crypton https://utopia-ecosystem.org/ https://utopia-ecosystem.org/. For its mining, only the Internet and a PC are needed, and the energy consumption is minimal.
- rozab 5y ago>Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Is this true? Back in 2015, techreport tested a bunch of SSDs to failure and it took 18 months to kill them all. This was a while ago, but I'd been lead to believe write endurance had only improved since then. https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/ https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
- inshadows 5y agoOh no! Regular people are using products for something legal that's not approved by "Hacker" "News"? Petabytes of storage capacity for decentralized storage network? That's obscene. Clearly that storage capacity is meant only to expand exabyte storage data centers of big tech. Only socially responsible way to store data is to rent capacity on AWS.