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Comment by ahnick | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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