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Chia Coin Miners Are Reselling Used SSDs as New
- a2tech 5y agoThe flash has never been touched right? Aren’t they functionally ‘new’?
- ceejayoz 5y agohttps://www.pcgamer.com/chia-mining-can-wreck-a-512gb-ssd-in-as-little-as-6-weeks/ https://www.pcgamer.com/chia-mining-can-wreck-a-512gb-ssd-in... > Chia farming is a write-intensive activity. Speed matters, so the most common strategy is to use an SSD for creating plots, because SSDs are much faster than HDDs, and then transfer them to an HDD once completed. > Chia is a different animal, though. According to MyDrivers, mining Chia can trash a 512GB in 40 days, while a 1TB SSD lasts twice as long, and a 2TB SSD can give up the ghost in just 160 days, or barely over five months.
- Ekaros 5y agoDoes that mean that bigger disk doesn't actually increase the speed which currency is generated?
- ceejayoz 5y agoYou'd be limited by write speed.
- qeternity 5y agoA bigger disk means you can store more "plots", which are the the files necessary for proof-of-storage, and thus makes it more likely that you will earn a block reward.. But in order to first generate these plots, you have to "farm" them which is a very write intensive process which is ultimately what is at focus here. The creation of these files requires so much writing that you are basically writing as fast as your CPU can, until the drive dies.
- ahnick 5y agoThe amount of XCH (Chia's currency) generated is a constant 64 Chia every 10 minutes. You can find this under the Chia Business Whitepaper (https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02-09-v1.0.pdf https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...) in the section "Post-launch Chia Emission Schedule". If you have a bigger disk that is filled with plots, then you are increasing the security of the network and thereby increasing the odds that you will win the block reward. For example, if you had 36EiB of space filled with plots then you would be equal to the entirety of the current Netspace of the Chia Network. (https://www.chiaexplorer.com/blockchain/blocks https://www.chiaexplorer.com/blockchain/blocks) So you would win the reward half the time and the rest of the network would win the reward the other half of the time. (i.e. 32 XCH every 10 minutes) Of course, this is an absurd example, as to obtain that amount of space it would probably cost you on the order of $20 billion just to procure the equipment, but at least it should give you an idea about how disk size works in regards to Chia.
- genewitch 5y agoLet's say I have 1.5TB of ram, can I just do this in tmpfs? The reason this eats SSD is because they have to physically heat a chip to erase, right? Also, does anyone want to buy my server with space for 1.5TB of ram? The 425W of idle power usage became too much and I am moving to Ryzen 5950k
- wmf 5y agoYes, last I checked you need ~300GB of scratch space to plot.
- humps 5y agoNot according to this https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chia-crypto-farming-can-destroy-ssds https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chia-crypto-farming-can-de...
- sithadmin 5y agoThe opposite of this. Chia is rather aggressive about issuing writes to disk and quickly chews through consumer grade SSDs' write endurance.
- zozbot234 5y agoThere's a difference between creating new "plots" to farm and farming an existing plot. The former is very write intensive, the latter is a pure read workload.
- formerly_proven 5y agoWell, yeah, that's why you use hard drives for storing plots (waiting for the distributed lottery to draw your plot's number) while continuously generating new lottery tickets on the SSDs.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoStill, one of the coin's selling points is that low-energy for farming and verifying transactions. That is kind of moot if there's an economic incentive to burn SSDs to get your hands on these eco-friendly coins.
- mangecoeur 5y agoFor something that was supposed to be more “green” this seems like a very obvious oversight
- ceejayoz 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing "Dishonesty? In my crypto? It's more likely than you think."
- rapind 5y agoReminds me of the argument this guy was making recently https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/link-global-bitcoin-mine-alberta-1.6137731 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/link-global-bitcoin-m... > "We look at, OK, what can we do to use this in a beneficial way … I don't want to say we're in the business of methane destruction, but we're in the business of beneficial use of that potential methane-generating source. You combust it properly. You don't flare it, and you control those emissions," Jenkins said.
- wmf 5y agoThis should be obvious, but anyone can sell any used hardware and claim it's new.
- imglorp 5y agoI think the subtext is, "yet another scam perpetuated by the cryptocurrency community at large." The whole thing started out as a utopian ideal for freeing people from centralized control of transactions and it's turning out to be yet another thing ruined by bad actors. In that context, buying SSD's from (largely) thieves who (largely) will fleece you in several other ways will not turn out well for you.
- agumonkey 5y agothere was a thread on HN about 'boring advices' and every 'utopian ideals' seems to be completely out of that class :)
- nyolfen 5y ago>I think the subtext is, "yet another scam perpetuated by the cryptocurrency community at large." sounds like it's specifically the chinese crypto community
- jazzyjackson 5y agoThe chia angle is quite fascinating tho, it is a machine that sucks the lifespan out of memory chips and cashes out with crypto-tokens. It is an invention that gives economic incentive to burn as many memory-cycles as you can before reselling the SSD, such that the recipient of the "new" SSD is ripped off. It's kind of like how the electricity to create a bitcoin costs more than the market value of the mining reward, the only way to be profitable is to steal electricity. In chia's case, the best way to profit is to steal memory write-cycles.
- londons_explore 5y agoCompared to database-in-datacenter type uses, chia actually puts very little load on ssd's. All writes are fully streaming, there is no write amplification, and there are lots of random reads involved (which don't really cause much wear/stress).
- lwansbrough 5y agoCool technology proof of waste is!
- tdeck 5y agoDon't worry, apparently they'll be moving to proof of wealth soon which is Much Better.
- garmaine 5y agoIsn't that exactly what proof of stake is?
- tdeck 5y agoYes that was my sarcastic point :).
- Dylan16807 5y agoProof of waste is also proof of wealth but with extra steps and bigger environmental consequences.
- sschueller 5y agoI'm going to build a social network with a coin that works on proof of klout. /s In all seriousness it would be an interesting social experiment.
- lordnacho 5y agoDon't SSDs store information about how often they've been written?
- ectopod 5y agoYes, but I guess that a committed crook can clock drives just as they clock cars.
- rsync 5y agoWord on the street is that they are resetting the SMART data with OEM firmware tools.
- dboreham 5y agoWhich is a thing that shouldn't be possible.
- jsploit 5y agoIf you own the hardware, why shouldn't you be able to control what data it stores?
- wmf 5y agoIf you own a car, why shouldn't you be able to reset the odometer? Because as a society we've decided not to make it too easy to hide wear.
- jsploit 5y agoI agree that it shouldn't be "too easy" as a fraud deterrent, but making it impossible seems like an overreach of consumer protection.
- MichaelZuo 5y agoLaws, standards, regulations?
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- rsync 5y agoThis is very relevant to our interests - specifically the part where prices of spinning disks more than doubled for a time earlier this year. As we dove into the chia coin rabbit hole to figure out just what was going on, it came to our attention that people are using firmware tools to reset SMART counters on drives … rolling back the odometer, so to speak. Just terrible behavior all around.
- londons_explore 5y agoI bought an SSD on eBay recently that massively underperformed my expectations. But I have no real proof to send it back for a refund. Instead I'll just have to suffer with super slow writes.
- Cacti 5y ago1. verify it against published benchmarks for that model 2. open up the case and see if it’s actually what you bought
- kkielhofner 5y agoIn my experience the eBay/Paypal resolution process is so heavily weighted to the buyer you shouldn't have any issues returning it and/or getting a refund.
- dheera 5y agoAlso, if someone is selling anything on eBay for above MSRP I report them for price gouging. Masks, sanitizer, drives, Ubiquiti cameras, anything. All reported.
- avalys 5y agoWhat will you do if the manufacturer increases the MSRP because demand exceeds supply? Report them for price gouging?
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- tus89 5y agoThere is a special place in hell for these cryptards.
- withinboredom 5y agoReminds me of a shop that would buy used CDs, DVDs, etc, buff the crap out of them, print out new art, shrinkwrap them, then sell them as new (not almost new) on Amazon. They went out of business after they were blacklisted on Amazon... well sorta. They just came back as a different company a few times.
- jakedata 5y agoThe interesting part is watching people learn to become junior sysadmins - running Linux for the first time, teaching themselves a bit about storage, learning some shell scripting, dealing with firewall ports. Also learning the hard way not to run every scrap of PowerShell or Bash someone posts on the Internet.
- bluedino 5y agoI'd rather they do this with Wordpress or Minecraft
- Havoc 5y agoCan’t say I’ve every encountered a truly bad shell script in the wild. Certainly not outright malicious and can’t recall a seriously breaking one either
- jakedata 5y agoexample: https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/nl94th/psa_potential_security_breach_for_end_users_who/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/nl94th/psa_potential_...
- oh_sigh 5y agoWhat's the punishment for this kind of sales fraud? Is it even possible to detect that the SMART counters have been reset?
- MertsA 5y agoIf you were suspicious that a drive was used before you ever plugged it in I bet you could identify it by immediately taking an out-of-the-box SMART snapshot and compare those values to a known good sample for that model drive. Drive manufacturers run tests when new, I doubt these Chia miners are trying to match up the powered on time and cycle count to a legitimate drive, they're probably just setting it to 0 and throwing it in a box. Unfortunately I highly doubt the majority of these fraudsters will face any real repercussions. Maybe a few victims will be able to successfully issue a chargeback, after many months maybe PayPal and other payment processors will try to freeze some funds, but whatever happens the fraudsters will still come out ahead. They'll just start selling under a new name and continue for another 6 months.
- boon 5y ago> SMART Any idea how you get known good samples for new drives (without buying a bunch of new drives)?
- ahnick 5y agoWhat people who read this article may not realize is that this is the Chia incentive model actually working properly. It is not cost effective to buy new hard drive equipment to farm(mine) Chia. (This was well discussed by Chia Network and the community before mainnet launch) Chia is really designed to be used to farm existing available storage space that people or companies already have for other purposes. For example, a home NAS system that may currently only be using a small portion of it's capacity. People can then slowly fill that space overtime and potentially make some money from their unused space. The only time it made sense to buy new equipment to try to plot really quickly, was right at the start before Netspace increased. Chia now has somewhere on the order of 300,000 - 400,000 full nodes operating on the network (already making it more decentralized than Bitcoin) and is approaching 36EiB of space. The "green" benefit of Chia is that you don't throw away the proofs that get generated like you do with Bitcoin mining and instead you can keep them for many years and potentially decades. This is where a lot of the power savings come from. Take a look at https://chiapower.org/ https://chiapower.org/ to understand the power usage compared to existing cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- nyolfen 5y ago> or example, a home NAS system that may currently only be using a small portion of it's capacity. People can then slowly fill that space overtime and potentially make some money from their unused space. using my spare disks like this does not make sense when it apparently burns them out very quickly. i doubt i would recoup even the cost of a new drive
- twalla 5y agoPlotting, or generating proofs, is what destroys SSDs, afterwards the plots are stored on disk and aren't read/write intensive. Think of it as printing bingo cards (plotting) and then sticking them in a file cabinet (farming). Your printer consumes ink and electricity, but keeping all your printed off bingo cards only costs you the space the file cabinet takes up and maybe the lights you turn on to look for winning cards when they get called.
- anigbrowl 5y agoI'm sad about it, but I'm deliberately missing out on a lot of good crypto opportunities because I don't want to spend time sifting through all the fraudulent/scammy ones.
- lvs 5y agoSo, to be clear about what's happening here, you only need an SSD for fast plotting in Chia. So it sounds like they are plotting to fill up HDDs, then reselling the SSDs to hedge against the possibility that the coin's value is not going to rise. It doesn't mean they're getting out of the game. It just means the network space has stabilized, and it's no longer necessary/valuable to plot any more space. But if the exchange rate rises, you can bet the network space rises too, requiring more resource-intensive plotting. That's why Chia is only more efficient than PoW when it isn't in demand.
- ahnick 5y ago> That's why Chia is only more efficient than PoW when it isn't in demand. Actually that's incorrect. Chia is always more efficient than PoW, b/c in PoW everyone is constantly racing to solve every block. (i.e. find the proof) Whoever finds the proof gets the block reward and everyone else just throws away all that work for nothing and then the next race starts for the next block reward. Contrast that with Chia, where when you are plotting you are storing your proofs in a file for later challenges. You aren't discarding that work and you can hold onto it for a long time (years). It's not until you are "farming" the plot that you start answering challenges. The challenges just translate to simple reads from disk, which are quick constant time lookups. Now it may take you a long time (or never) to find a reward for a single proof, but at least you didn't have to throw all that work away and start over.
- lvs 5y agoI agree in part and disagree in part. First, when the network space is growing exponentially, the value of preexisting work is decaying exponentially. I do grant you that completed work is nonzero in value, but during a growth phase its value might as well be zero. Whenever speculators believe the currency will actually have any long term value above its current exchange rate minus the resource costs, then it will be in a growth phase. The total resource consumption during this growth phase, including the supply chains to produce space, need to be studied. Measured in transactions per unit of CO2 emissions, I expect its efficiency to be better only during a phase of stable network space, i.e. when its value is not speculated to be higher than its current value. Second, not all PoW is discarded. I want to be clear at the outset that this isn't a defense of PoW, but there's a system called AuxPoW which allows work to be applied to multiple chains, modestly improving its efficiency. This mining protocol is being used actively by scrypt hashed coins, e.g. dogecoin and litecoin. I'm certainly not saying PoW is superior to the proof system in Chia, but just that the distinction between them is not as strong as claimed. Nevertheless, both are incredibly destructive and yet interesting.
- lph 5y agoIt's almost as if any crypto scheme whose mining entails the massive waste of a resource is going to cause problems.
- giantrobot 5y agoB..b..but disruption! Blockchain! Crypto!! To the moon! /s Crypto is like Eternal September where everyone wields flame throwers.
- gfosco 5y agoImportant distinction between chia drives used for plotting versus storage. The intensive write use is during plotting and would be on the smallest and fastest drives, in the 1-4TB range. Personal experience, I generated almost 400TB of plots and never had a drive go bad or experience any major performance issues. The massive storage arrays barely get touched, small reads only.
- mastax 5y agoNow I'm wondering if those cheap Optane drives from mainland China on eBay are not actually new. They do seem too good to be true.
- shadilay 5y agoI can't see how it would ever be cost effective to mine on optane. MSRP is ~10x NAND.
- arthur2e5 5y agoThose might be alright. I recall seeing them a lot before Chia was even a thing too. Allegedly cannibalized from laptops (tiny SSD for system + larger HDD for storage configurations) and office desktop computers. Thought about getting one for swap, but don’t have a free slot.
- arglebarglegar 5y agocrypto is like asshole pheromones, you want to surprise me in the space? show me a coin that isn’t
- shirro 5y agoCrypto currency is a blight on the world.
- 3np 5y ago> The report even says that the used drives are bought in bulk, renewed later on, and sold as brand new domestically or in China, where the demand for these drives is still very high. So it's probably only a matter of time before these renewed SSDs appear on the Chinese market, and naturally, filter out to other markets like the rest of Asia, Europe, and the U.S. This confused me a bit; where is "domestically", actually? The linked article fails to mention it but the original report is from the perspective of and looking at Vietnam.