New Chia coin crypto with Proof of Space may create shortage of storage device | Hacker News Reader

New Chia coin crypto with Proof of Space may create shortage of storage device

wccftech.com

32 pointsAceSlash19 comments

Chia is pitched as a more environmentally friendly alternative to proof of work, but it’s unclear how much better it is. The energy consumption of proof of work is related only to the relationship between the price of performing the work and the price of the proof of work coin. Efficiency is a concept which is meaningless for proof of work.

The same dynamic will hold with Chia. If the price goes up, this will result in more money being spent on storage devices to mine it. These storage devices will not use as much electricity as hashing miners, but this means that the operators will have more money to spend buying more storage devices, which they will have to do if they want to keep up with the pack.

In summary: Bitcoin work is manufacturing and putting electricity into hashing chips. Chia work is manufacturing storage chips. It’s unclear whether $100 spent manufacturing a storage chip is less bad for the environment than $100 running a hashing chip.

I think the difference in energy consumption between storage devices and GPU miners is being significantly downplayed here. While a good bit of energy has to be consumed to generate the plots, the benefit is that once completed the storage devices may sit idle in a much more energy efficient farming machine (and for quite literally forever).

As of right now the network is only a very small percentage of the global storage market, so it is hard to imagine any impact on chip supply chains, but of course there is no telling what stress could be brought in the future as the network grows, we will have to see.

However in a time when energy usage and carbon footprint are being used as direct attacks to "cancel" cryptocurrency (which are legitimate concerns, not only just about "cancelling" crypto), I can't help but wonder if Chia is in the place to completely change the game with adoption of proof of space.

https://chiapower.org/

The tradeoff is very simple: spend $100 on electricity, or spend $100 manufacturing storage chips? Chia miners can't just decide not to spend the $100 buying more storage, because if they don't, someone else will, pushing up the storage requirement, and reducing their income.

I'm familiar with the economics of mining, I don't know why it is thought that Chia was supposed to change that.

Their initiative is a GPU mining alternative which utilizes less power. The point of my comment was to emphasize that they have achieved exactly that.

So crypto based on proof-of-X is really an economic driver for waste-of-X. This all makes so little sense when were simultaneously moving toward UBI and giving it away.

Time for proof-of-evil!

Proof of stake is the only consensus mechanism that remotely makes sense (that I've seen so far anyhow). It has its own nightmarish unintended consequences but at least it isn't actually burning a significant portion of world resources.

> It has its own nightmarish unintended consequences

What are these?

Rich get richer forever.

Which, to be fair, is also a feature of capitalism.

That’s true of POW, no? Is there any cryptocurrency where it isn’t?

What a giant waste of human effort and natural resources.

Humanity is fucked

HDD and SSD prices to the moon! Now we just need a coin that can somehow inflate motherboard prices and we'll have the whole computer pointlessly inflating in value

Paying people for proof of waste. A subsidy for environmental damage.

Article says it mostly should affect higher capacity drives, so consumers buying <4TB probably won't be impacted much.

Chia has two stages for mining: plotting and farming. Plotting requires as fast storage as possible, so it is usually done on NVM SSDs in increments of 100GB. Then you copy those 100GB plot files to a farm machine with large but slower HDD.

Seems like paid promotion for this coin.

The project has been in the works for years now founded by BitTorrent author Bram Cohen, it would be a bit naive to believe a pump and dump from hacker news is what they're after.

Chia has a massive premine meaning it will never be decentralised and independent of its creator.

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