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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

While I hold a modest amount of Bitcoin, it’s pretty clear that it’s just digital gold at this point, and not really a currency in a practical sense. And the mining situation is ridiculous, both from a power usage perspective and a miner centralization perspective.

I’ve been digging into this project lately and it’s pretty exciting: https://www.chia.net especially considering Bram Cohen is the brain behind it (the BitTorrent guy).

Really good real time community on Keybase, I also launched a forum that I’m trying to get some traction with to preserve knowledge for the project at https://chiaforum.com

It’s a lot of fun building and running the chia farming rigs, feels way more accessible than the mining stuff. Also, since it’s barely just launched, and it’s on good tech foundation, it’s exciting to be in “early” on a new coin.

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Yeah, I think a lot of altcoins try to create the 'early in' vibe. Not sure how many and which of them avoid becoming irelevant in the long term.

Perhaps one that avoids the 'early in' vibe by having an even distribution over time.

My biggest concern with Chia, is that Proof of Space doesn't actually "use up" any space. In particular, this means that when a "miner" is faced with a choice of two competing blocks (or transactions) their best option is to simply "mine" on both of them. This is doable because, by it's very nature, proof of space has little to no opportunity cost.

As a result, it seems that proof of space doesn't really come to any consensus. In particular the Chia software will track up to 5 simultaneous chain tips as a consequence of this.

P.S. My understanding could be a few years out of date, so do correct me if I'm wrong.

Is this something I could get into with 2TB disks? Say 12-15 2TB disks. I have a bunch that are too old to trust and are sitting on a shelf. Any idea how disk failures affect things?

Yes, you could do that. 24-30TB of plots would win a block roughly every day or so with the current netspace.

I'm using a bunch of used drives and not worried about disk failure because worst case scenario is replacing the drive and re-generating new plots.

You need a temporary space of 312GiB to "plot" which is RAM intensive(~4GB min, more if you parallelize) and disk I/O bottlenecked(serious Chia farmers put their temp on an SSD), but finished plots are 101.4GiB each and are just files accessed occasionally, so you can fit a dozen or so on a 2TB. If the drive goes, so do the plots, but the cost is just the time to replot so you probably don't need a backup strategy.

Plotting tends to be a bottleneck - hours to finish one in my experience, though that is with using the storage drive for the temp space. But even with 26 plots(2.5 TiB) I have already earned 4 Chia in a few weeks.

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