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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> but there is a lot of spare storage space on servers/external drives owned by individuals or companies globally speaking.

Companies have spare storage…but it sure as shit ain’t worth it to them. This is the hubris of most crypto projects: they have no real economic grasp of the problems they jump into. Amazon isn’t going to fuck around with Chia for what amounts to literal dust on their balance sheet. Businesses aren’t going to jeopardize their core competency for a couple of bucks. And the average Joe doesn’t actually have external storage space. Spotify, iCloud, Dropbox, etc. It’s all professional miners. Chia is not decentralized.

> 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.

The payoff for the lottery is HUGE. So even though the EV is negative, people still do it. The payoff for Chia is comparatively small. People won’t (and don’t) care.

> Companies have spare storage…but it sure as shit ain’t worth it to them. This is the hubris of most crypto projects: they have no real economic grasp of the problems they jump into. Amazon isn’t going to fuck around with Chia for what amounts to literal dust on their balance sheet. Businesses aren’t going to jeopardize their core competency for a couple of bucks. And the average Joe doesn’t actually have external storage space. Spotify, iCloud, Dropbox, etc. It’s all professional miners. Chia is not decentralized.

Which companies will adopt it and which ones won't is probably hard to determine from the outside. It should be a fairly objective evaluation though internally for a company in terms of what hardware the company currently has and what it will cost to farm Chia and what future expected value for Chia may be. Chia has somewhere between 300K - 400K full nodes operating on the network. That is objectively more decentralized than Bitcoin that has somewhere on the order of 40K - 80K full nodes the last time I checked. So I would say Chia is the most decentralized network I currently know of.

> The payoff for the lottery is HUGE. So even though the EV is negative, people still do it. The payoff for Chia is comparatively small. People won’t (and don’t) care.

That will be a function of the price of Chia. As Chia's price increases more and more people will want to get into that lottery. A lot more people will consider farming some plots of Chia if one XCH is worth $50K compared to $250.

> Chia has somewhere between 300K - 400K full nodes operating on the network. That is objectively more decentralized than Bitcoin that has somewhere on the order of 40K - 80K full nodes the last time I checked. So I would say Chia is the most decentralized network I currently know of.

And Amazon has millions of nodes. That doesn’t make them decentralized.

We have no idea who owns the nodes, or what the concentration of ownership is for the top X%

Chia's nodes are not all running in the same data centers and owned by a single company like Amazon's. To imply that is disingenuous at best. They are operating all over the globe in independently owned data centers and people's private residences. Geo-location by IP will give a fairly good indication of that, but even just a simple survey of farmers from forums, chat, reddit, etc will give you a feel for the heavy presence throughout Asia, Australia, Europe and the US. Also, you can look at the number of unique pool public keys to get a feel for the ownership decentralization. (https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/networkDecentralisation) While not perfect, people do not tend to create lots and lots of pool public keys. Therefore, one can be relatively confident that the network has a high degree of decentralization.

>very write intensive, and thus destroys the SSD

I'm not going to argue about how Chia Coin works, but I'm always skeptical of claims about excessive writes destroying SSDs.

From what I understand, this is mostly unfounded fear based on the fact that earlier MLC cells were specced for a minimum of 10,000 write cycles and people extrapolated 5-10 year life expectancies from that. In practice, though, testing showed that the typical cell could be rewritten around 1,000,000 times, and the controllers would just route around the weaker cells that died early.

Anecdotally, even though consumer SSDs have been mainstream for around a decade now, I have not heard, IRL or online, of a single person complain that their SSD has failed (manufacturing defects such as the Sandforce firmware bug aside). At the same time, I've personally witnessed dozens of HDD failures.

I don't fully understand why fear around consumer SSDs is still a thing, but I suspect it's exactly the same "Reddit expert" social dynamic that drives the advice around thermal paste application.

The claim comes from Chia devs themselves, who recommend not using consumer-grade drives due to their low endurance.

> The one thing in common will be that you need high endurance, due to the fact that it take almost ~1.8TB of writes using the -e flag or 1.6TB without that option to create a single K=32 plot.

> Endurance is how much data can be written to the SSD before it wears out. In Chia this is important because a plotting SSD will generally be at 100% duty cycle and writing all day.

> A mixed use or high endurance data center or enterprise SSD is the best choice for plotting. Used SSDs with plenty of endurance can be found for a good value on eBay, Craigslist, or similar.

> Consumer NVMe SSDs are generally not recommended due to the lower endurance, and they often employ caching algorithms to faster media (SLC, or single level cell) for great bursty performance. They do not perform well under heavy workload sustained IO. There are very high performance consumer NVMe SSDs that will offer great plotting performance, but the lower rated endurance in TBW will result in a faster wearout.

https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/SSD-End...

Most drives these days are TLC and and consumers are more likely on QLC. I havent even seen an MLC drive for a while now.

Do you sources for the 1 million writes(erase) on MLC NAND?

I work with enterprise SSDs and that number is well above anything I've seen or heard, even from the manufacturers.

I can't find a source for my original claim, but based on some real world tests[1] it looks like real-world performance is closer to 50-100k writes.

It seems I misremembered the quantitative data, but the overall qualitative point (SSD Endurance is much, much higher than most "prosumers" believe) is accurate.

[1] https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

Generally agree, but Chia plotting is REALLY write intensive workload.

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