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What 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

by ahnick 5y ago

What 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 ago
  Plotting, 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.
  - thedrbrian 5y ago
    So it’s just internet bingo? Does the network do anything useful with all the HDD space it takes up like decentralised storage ?
    - wmf 5y ago
      It prevents transactions from being double-spent, like all cryptocurrency. Whether that's useful is up to you.
- ahnick 5y ago
  This is only really true when plotting to consumer grade SSDs, which are limited in the number of writes that they can support. NAS systems usually contain mechanical HDDs and can handle the write load of Chia without issue.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    I think this was missed in this whole issue. I'm not arguing for or against Chia, but basically in order to bootstrap a mining operation faster, miners were generating the initial files on a much faster SSD and then transferring to HDD. The initial bootstrap ("plotting") is very write intensive, and thus destroys the SSD. HDD do not have the same sensitivity to write heavy workloads. So if one simply plotted very slowly on an HDD with the spare space they had, it would not likely impact the expected lifespan, and they could earn a few pennies for their efforts. However the issue with all of these crypto efforts is that systems naturally trend towards centralization for reasons of efficiency. The best systems have some balance between the two. It's simply not worth it for most people to plot 100gb of free space on their laptop for Chia and earn a few cents per month. So it only makes sense for miners to do at scale.
    - ahnick 5y ago
      Yeah plotting on a laptop with a 100GB free is not worth it (especially since they typically have consumer ssds in them), but there is a lot of spare storage space on servers/external drives owned by individuals or companies globally speaking. This global storage distribution that already exists and the fact that no specialized hardware (ASICs) are needed is why Chia has been able to become more decentralized than any other cryptocurrency currently. It will be interesting to see how things centralize or decentralize going forward. When I think of the lottery I'm always amazed by the number of people that play it even with the extraordinarily low odds of winning that exist. I think there will be some equilibrium that's found for the global number of operating nodes that will be a function on the odds of finding a proof and Chia's price.
      - qeternity 5y ago
- skybrian 5y ago
  Yes, it's probably too late. Or so I've heard. Chia is like Bingo. Generating the Bingo cards can put a lot of wear on an SSD, but once you have the bingo cards to fill up whatever space you have, you can play for nearly free. I haven't done the calculation myself, but I've read that it's no longer worthwhile to generate new cards. If so, that means most of the damage has already been done. It's a sunk cost. But the people who are already in the game can keep playing indefinitely. If prices are too low to even do that, they could back up to tape and go offline for a while.
  - chiph 5y ago
    I agree. I had 20TB extra space on my NAS, so I spent $100 on an entry-level SSD to do plotting. 200 plots later, it's well-used, but not close to dead. I'll probably put my FFIV game files on it to get faster load times. In the meantime, my operating cost is running the NAS (which was going to be powered up anyway), and some CPU power to handle the farming (not even noticeable on a Ryzen 3900X).
- wmf 5y ago
  Chia plotting/farming at hobbyist scale shouldn't wear out anything.
  - weare138 5y ago
    But you're not going to make any money either. According to Chia Calculator 100TiB would generate a whopping $6.17 a day. Just like mining any other crypto it's already out of reach for hobbyists. https://chiacalculator.com/ https://chiacalculator.com/
    - esyir 5y ago
      Hm. Would be a way to subsidize the price of my NAS expansion though. Only 10TB left makes me want an upgrade to 56 TB more, that's not cheap. Allocating 40TB to chia over a year would cover a good 2.5 * 365 = ~1000 a year. That's a nice subsidy to my NAS setup if all it requires is that I burn out a 1TB SSD.
      - e_proxus 5y ago
        Your calculations are probably correct, but the whole cryptocurrency fad strikes me as completely ridiculous. It’s like a farm burning some of their crops to generate a bit of hot air for wind power. Like, you can do it and it gives you that small amount of power but you’re literally destroying the resource and probably cause a lot of waste in the system as a whole.
nathanvanfleet 5y ago
I definitely want to destroy my Home Nas in a matter of months to make a little money. This makes perfect sense. It seems like this is the energy problems of bitcoin but now it's physical hardware that is the inefficiency? I guess Bitcoin is similar with old miners becoming defunct etc and the cost of video cards. But intentionally running down the life of hard drives is a innovative new feature I guess
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  The video cards were being used for ETH and altcoins. Thankfully ETH next upgrade is to turn off proof of work.
- ahnick 5y ago
  > I definitely want to destroy my Home Nas in a matter of months to make a little money. That won't happen unless your NAS is a bunch of consumer grade SSDs, which I hope it is not.
  - rini17 5y ago
    Even consumer grade HDDs aren't built for sustained full load. I had few die in months just because of active torrents reseeding which is lighter load than chia.
Krisjohn 5y ago
No, it's not. Chia is just "proof of prior work" and as such has the same arms race problem as bitcoin. People aren't just buying a few TB, farming it and being content. They're building farming rigs and piling on the storage constantly. It just consumes power AND storage.
- ahnick 5y ago
  Again, it was only cost-effective to build farming rigs in the very beginning. It is no longer cost-effective to do so. Even major companies will eventually have a tough time competing with the amount of storage space that is already deployed in the world. IIRC is around ~7 Zettabytes. That is the big difference with Bitcoin. Chia is making use of a resource that already exists in the world and is well distributed. Bitcoin ASICs require manufacturing and building machines for the specific purpose of mining Bitcoin and then distributing those machines.
  - phire 5y ago
    It's not really worth using your free space. I currently have 4TB of free space. I could plot them which would result in an estimated $7.57/month of income per month. But.... that's not a constant $7.57 each month. Instead, it's a 1.5% chance of winning a single payout of 2 XCH each month. I could reasonably expect to go five years, never winning a single XCH. Who knows what the value of XCH will be then. There has been a pretty solid downward trend in price since May, contrary to most coins, which started trending up again.
    - ahnick 5y ago
      It sort of depends on your process right? If you just want to download the client software and point it at your existing drive and start plotting in the background while doing something else, then I tend to think why not? Worse case scenario you continue to get nothing for the space you currently get nothing for. Also, if you want frequent payouts you can join a pool and then you don't have to worry about going 5 years without getting a reward.
SrslyJosh 5y ago
> What people who read this article may not realize is that this is the Chia incentive model actually working properly. I think that most people commenting here understand that this is the way that proof-of-* systems end up functioning at scale. Participants in these systems are incentivized to cut corners, externalize costs, and generally fuck things up for everyone else.
hackingforfun 5y ago
> 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. Are Bitcoin miners as ready to jump ship to the next thing, if it falls out of favor? I don't think so. Chia is not as popular (it is currently #230 on Coinmarketcap). I also don't think that the power savings of Chia outweigh the space considerations.

by ahnick 5y ago

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 ago
Plotting, 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.
- thedrbrian 5y ago
  So it’s just internet bingo? Does the network do anything useful with all the HDD space it takes up like decentralised storage ?
  - wmf 5y ago
    It prevents transactions from being double-spent, like all cryptocurrency. Whether that's useful is up to you.
ahnick 5y ago
This is only really true when plotting to consumer grade SSDs, which are limited in the number of writes that they can support. NAS systems usually contain mechanical HDDs and can handle the write load of Chia without issue.
- qeternity 5y ago
  I think this was missed in this whole issue. I'm not arguing for or against Chia, but basically in order to bootstrap a mining operation faster, miners were generating the initial files on a much faster SSD and then transferring to HDD. The initial bootstrap ("plotting") is very write intensive, and thus destroys the SSD. HDD do not have the same sensitivity to write heavy workloads. So if one simply plotted very slowly on an HDD with the spare space they had, it would not likely impact the expected lifespan, and they could earn a few pennies for their efforts. However the issue with all of these crypto efforts is that systems naturally trend towards centralization for reasons of efficiency. The best systems have some balance between the two. It's simply not worth it for most people to plot 100gb of free space on their laptop for Chia and earn a few cents per month. So it only makes sense for miners to do at scale.
  - ahnick 5y ago
    Yeah plotting on a laptop with a 100GB free is not worth it (especially since they typically have consumer ssds in them), but there is a lot of spare storage space on servers/external drives owned by individuals or companies globally speaking. This global storage distribution that already exists and the fact that no specialized hardware (ASICs) are needed is why Chia has been able to become more decentralized than any other cryptocurrency currently. It will be interesting to see how things centralize or decentralize going forward. When I think of the lottery I'm always amazed by the number of people that play it even with the extraordinarily low odds of winning that exist. I think there will be some equilibrium that's found for the global number of operating nodes that will be a function on the odds of finding a proof and Chia's price.
    - qeternity 5y ago
skybrian 5y ago
Yes, it's probably too late. Or so I've heard. Chia is like Bingo. Generating the Bingo cards can put a lot of wear on an SSD, but once you have the bingo cards to fill up whatever space you have, you can play for nearly free. I haven't done the calculation myself, but I've read that it's no longer worthwhile to generate new cards. If so, that means most of the damage has already been done. It's a sunk cost. But the people who are already in the game can keep playing indefinitely. If prices are too low to even do that, they could back up to tape and go offline for a while.
- chiph 5y ago
  I agree. I had 20TB extra space on my NAS, so I spent $100 on an entry-level SSD to do plotting. 200 plots later, it's well-used, but not close to dead. I'll probably put my FFIV game files on it to get faster load times. In the meantime, my operating cost is running the NAS (which was going to be powered up anyway), and some CPU power to handle the farming (not even noticeable on a Ryzen 3900X).
wmf 5y ago
Chia plotting/farming at hobbyist scale shouldn't wear out anything.
- weare138 5y ago
  But you're not going to make any money either. According to Chia Calculator 100TiB would generate a whopping $6.17 a day. Just like mining any other crypto it's already out of reach for hobbyists. https://chiacalculator.com/ https://chiacalculator.com/
  - esyir 5y ago
    Hm. Would be a way to subsidize the price of my NAS expansion though. Only 10TB left makes me want an upgrade to 56 TB more, that's not cheap. Allocating 40TB to chia over a year would cover a good 2.5 * 365 = ~1000 a year. That's a nice subsidy to my NAS setup if all it requires is that I burn out a 1TB SSD.
    - e_proxus 5y ago
      Your calculations are probably correct, but the whole cryptocurrency fad strikes me as completely ridiculous. It’s like a farm burning some of their crops to generate a bit of hot air for wind power. Like, you can do it and it gives you that small amount of power but you’re literally destroying the resource and probably cause a lot of waste in the system as a whole.

nathanvanfleet 5y ago

I definitely want to destroy my Home Nas in a matter of months to make a little money. This makes perfect sense. It seems like this is the energy problems of bitcoin but now it's physical hardware that is the inefficiency? I guess Bitcoin is similar with old miners becoming defunct etc and the cost of video cards. But intentionally running down the life of hard drives is a innovative new feature I guess

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
The video cards were being used for ETH and altcoins. Thankfully ETH next upgrade is to turn off proof of work.
ahnick 5y ago
> I definitely want to destroy my Home Nas in a matter of months to make a little money. That won't happen unless your NAS is a bunch of consumer grade SSDs, which I hope it is not.
- rini17 5y ago
  Even consumer grade HDDs aren't built for sustained full load. I had few die in months just because of active torrents reseeding which is lighter load than chia.

Krisjohn 5y ago

No, it's not. Chia is just "proof of prior work" and as such has the same arms race problem as bitcoin. People aren't just buying a few TB, farming it and being content. They're building farming rigs and piling on the storage constantly. It just consumes power AND storage.

ahnick 5y ago
Again, it was only cost-effective to build farming rigs in the very beginning. It is no longer cost-effective to do so. Even major companies will eventually have a tough time competing with the amount of storage space that is already deployed in the world. IIRC is around ~7 Zettabytes. That is the big difference with Bitcoin. Chia is making use of a resource that already exists in the world and is well distributed. Bitcoin ASICs require manufacturing and building machines for the specific purpose of mining Bitcoin and then distributing those machines.
- phire 5y ago
  It's not really worth using your free space. I currently have 4TB of free space. I could plot them which would result in an estimated $7.57/month of income per month. But.... that's not a constant $7.57 each month. Instead, it's a 1.5% chance of winning a single payout of 2 XCH each month. I could reasonably expect to go five years, never winning a single XCH. Who knows what the value of XCH will be then. There has been a pretty solid downward trend in price since May, contrary to most coins, which started trending up again.
  - ahnick 5y ago
    It sort of depends on your process right? If you just want to download the client software and point it at your existing drive and start plotting in the background while doing something else, then I tend to think why not? Worse case scenario you continue to get nothing for the space you currently get nothing for. Also, if you want frequent payouts you can join a pool and then you don't have to worry about going 5 years without getting a reward.

SrslyJosh 5y ago

> What people who read this article may not realize is that this is the Chia incentive model actually working properly. I think that most people commenting here understand that this is the way that proof-of-* systems end up functioning at scale. Participants in these systems are incentivized to cut corners, externalize costs, and generally fuck things up for everyone else.

hackingforfun 5y ago

> 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. Are Bitcoin miners as ready to jump ship to the next thing, if it falls out of favor? I don't think so. Chia is not as popular (it is currently #230 on Coinmarketcap). I also don't think that the power savings of Chia outweigh the space considerations.