I just... do not understand how smart, even _brilliant_ people, the sort of people who know enough to make something like this, can look at Bitcoin... the waste, the way it has utterly failed to achieve what it set out to do[1], everything, and thinks, I know, I want to do that, but instead of blowing up the market for GPUs it'll be SSDs. Why? To get rich? It even seems doubtful to me that the people who developed Chia are the ones who'll make the money off it, if there is any to make.
[1] Who uses Bitcoin for peer-to-peer payments? And the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it exists right now, far from allowing people to transact without third parties, is driving a cambrian explosion in third parties, because most people are incapable of transacting Bitcoin themselves.
I am... Suspicious of all the chia articles popping up on HN. I have not seen the same kind of buzz happening in other crypto spaces about it. And I am also suspicious about the claims that chia is the one that is such a threat to data storage supply, considering there are other crypto currencies with a similar approach.
Overall, I am inclined to say that this is a submarine and HN is falling for it.
Regardless, more to the point of the article, the argument and moral panic rings hollow. Chia just incentives other people to store data for people who want to store data. The place, overhead and mechanism of data retrieval is different, but, still, someone wants to store the data there and they pay for it. So how then is this more of a threat than cloud providers for example?
Later Edit: I mistook Chia as having a similar approach as Filecoin, but, on closer inspection, it seems that they do not store data people want they just store data to prove it's stored and use that to distribute mining rewards. So I was wrong at this end. Still, I maintain my opinion this is a submarine.
It took me a while to actually understand how proof-of-work mining works because seemingly every article one the subject gives too abstract of an explanation. Turns out it's not that complex if you understand what a cryptographic hash is. Just take a block (a list of recent transactions) and take a SHA-256 hash if it over and over with slight variations until you get a hash that starts with enough consecutive zeroes.
I'm having the same issue with understanding proof-of-space. Could someone give a technical explanation for those of us that understand basic cryptography (but aren't professional cryptographists)?
Proof-of-space is essentially stored Proof-of-work. You are pre-filling your drive with many cryptographic hash's. When a challenge comes in the software will do a quick check to see if any of your plots could possibly have a proof (a hash with sufficient zeros for that challenge). If any of your plots pass this filter then the plot is looked up on the HDD to check if it does indeed contain a proof. The difficulty, the number of zeros needed for a hash to be considered a proof, adjusts as the network grows to ensure a steady supply of coins. With proof-of-work you are printing lottery tickets every time a challenge comes in, then throwing them away and starting again, with Proof-of-space you are printing your tickets once and then storing them for years. There is extra layers, Chia is actually proof-of-space-and-time, so that you can't win by faking proof-of-space with proof-of-work.
One way is using zero knowledge computational integrity proofs. They allow me to prove to you that I know of pre-image of some hash without revealing what it is.
Say the network has seen 1TB of data before with hash H. It can generate a random number as a challenge, and request a miner to prove they have access to the 1TB worth of pre-image at the same time it has access to the random challenge. The only way for a miner to compute such a proof is to have the 1TB of data stored somewhere.
What you describe is an instance of the Hashcash Proof-of-Work. There are many other types of PoW, which don't amount to just computing a hash function [1].
There are multiple flavors of proof of space and they seem to be based on quite complex math to the extent that a simple explanation may not be possible.
Interesting. There are a bunch of variants, but it seems like there are three main ways of handling crypto.
Bitcoin is proof of work, which of course requires a lot of electricity.
Some coins, like Neo/CutCoin are proof of stake, which basically let you stake some money, which I guess you can't spend and use that to handle transactions, so instead of running mining rigs, you just stake the money and earn a return. Ethereum is planning to move to proof of stake. Kinda like how your FDIC insured bank can loan your deposit out.
Chiacoin, is proof of space and time, IE proof of assigned storage through the use of stored data, plus a verified delay function (slow to calculate, fast to verify hashing basically). The latter part needs only one processor, so whoever calculates fastest is accepted, so you aren't running a bunch of miners racing to benefit.
I'm not sure that I see the benefit of proof of space and time except in the case of things like filecoin, where you are basically paid for storing stuff on your hard drive without changing it. Chia coin is, if I understand things correctly, just sticking random numbers on a SDD to "farm" them. I mean the VDF stuff is cool to be sure, but it seems like in the case of Chia it's just wasting memory space with random numbers rather then incentivizing storage of existing data.
Is there a better system than proof of stake, in terms of just not being absurdly wasteful in terms of energy or storage capacity?
For the purpose of responsible disclosure, I do have less than $20 bucks of ethereum atm, and that's the only amount of any coin mentioned above. I have no investments in the companies behind any of the above coins.
All of these proof of X are just mechanism to find the next “leader” who will be in charge of proposing the next page of the ledger. Proof of work has proven to be wasteful, I personally don’t really see a great usecase in proof of space, proof of stake is basically the way to go. That being said, you have leaderless consensus protocols (avalanche) and even consensusless protocols (AT2).
> This “farming” process differs from mining in the sense that you don’t need specialised equipment to participate; anything from a laptop to a smartphone can be used to farm Chia. The more free space you have, however, the more likely you’ll be rewarded.
This seems like an ad for Chia disguised as a hit piece. It doesn't help that the author's only other article is trying to pump Dogecoin.
Field Notes, Terran Expedition 6, Chief Archivist Blaxarll:
"Terran life took a sudden dramatic shift after the fall of Hominid dominance. The turning point appears to have occured when the sacrificial demands of Blockchain worship spiraled out of control after fuel-based offerings were supplanted by info storage based offerings. This, in and of itself, was not terribly harmful, but the model was used by the Cult of Aquaricoin. The so-called Water Miners enshrined a marketplace for non-fungible indulgences depicting popular figures. This was backed by a Proof of Potable Water algorithmic catechism, and swiftly resulted in total extinction for the species.
It is this researcher's opinion that we are fortunate the Terran Hominids had only just discovered space travel, for they very well could have extinguished the resources of our own homeworlds for such religious decadence."
To be honest I kind of wish someone would build a proof-of-bandwidth crypto. Miners would overtake data centers with cheap transit, driving the build out of more long-haul network. Some would then move to different neighborhoods just to get FTTH access, enabling more incentive for last-mile build out.
> To be honest I kind of wish someone would build a proof-of-bandwidth crypto.
https://pkt.cash/ exists "built to incentivize the growth of infrastructure," and "PKT Network is designed to decentralize internet access around the world by enabling anyone to become an ISP." [0]
If I were to own a transit for the purpose of profitting from proof-of-bandwidth, ignoring the regulation and law for the communication infrastructure, would I?
A) Let everyone have their fair share of bandwidth
B) with DPI, choke other miners so I'm relatively better in the whole miners.
Also, bandwidth will be wasted just for the sake of proof-of-work instead of traditional work that have real values on its own.
Folks here might be interested in Chia's smart contract language: https://chialisp.com/
Basically the designers saw how easily many Ethereum/Solidity contracts were hacked and saw that stateful side effects were the main culprit so they made their language have no side effects! Pretty cool.
I asked this recently but the topic died before I got many answers. Basically, I’m not a cryptocurrency denier. I just don’t understand it. Do people want cryptocurrency because they want to spend it on stuff? Or do they want cryptocurrency because they want to sell it for other currencies? In other words, at what point will a cryptocurrency stand on its own as something that’s worth a pair of shoes? Instead of being something that people invest in to eventually sell for dollars with which they they buy shoes? Again- I know I just don’t understand. My original question:
1 point by theshadowknows 4 days ago | parent [–] | on: The Last Days of Satoshi: What Happened When Bitco...
Bitcoin and other crypto/alt currencies are so interesting to me. Partly because I do not understand them:
If I mow your lawn and you pay me in the locally accepted fiat then I can use that fiat to buy hotdogs and fuel for my lawn mower because the gas station itself will accept that fiat.
The gas station will accept that fiat because its vendors, creditors, and employees also accept it. And the chain goes on.
If however I mow your lawn and you pay me in bitcoin I'll need to find a gas station that accepts it. Many likely exist. But, how many of their vendors, creditors, and employees also accept it? Some, no doubt, but I'd wager not all would.
So, even though these currencies no doubt represent massive potential they're still somewhat limited in terms of adoption. Obviously this is becoming less true over time which I think is a good thing - competition isn't something fiat currencies tend to have to deal with, but they sure could use it.
My real misunderstanding is 'why' people accept these currencies in the first place. In other words - people accept a United States dollar because it is worth one United States dollar. However, it seems that most people accept bitcoin (or bitcoin fragments) not because they are worth some percentage of bitcoin but exactly because they are worth some amount of United States dollars. Is that true? Is the primary reason that bitcoin has become more popular that an investor can spend 10,000 fiat on it - wait a year - and then extract 15,000 fiat from it?
> Do people want cryptocurrency because they want to spend it on stuff?
Some of us did. Last month marks 10 years since I was introduced to the community and registered on the bitcoin-otc. We bought and sold all sorts of random crap (food items, laptops, gadgets, one regular even paid people bitcoin to have them buy him lunch. A brief time existed where some of the more idealists expected bitcoin to replace Paypal. That obviously didn't happen.
Starting with Satoshidice gambling the network performance started to crap up and fees began to climb. Eventually it became worthless for any sort of fast/cheap transacting and everything centralized onto a few exchanges. Every asshole in the world has proposed ways to improve this issue, but with all the money sunk into bitcoin and a lot of arguments we aren't in a better situation today.
Now every naive person from 20-some year olds to 70-year olds are hitting me up and asking what I think of NFT's and the shitcoin of the week because they saw some heads on Bloomberg gushing over it and I'm just tired of it all.
It's more like the promise that you could spend $10,000, wait five years, then retire. Bitcoin's historical >10,000x returns have triggered massive amounts of envy, greed, and FOMO.
Gridcoin is designed for this. It is based on scientific research and instead of sha256 hashes of random data, coins are earned by proof of your computer doing scientific research.
From their homepage:
> Examples include protein structure prediction (Rosetta@home), mapping the Milky Way galaxy (Milkyway@home), and tackling problems in public health and clean energy (World Community Grid).
oh great, another item that will be impossible to buy soon
thanks, miners
the sooner someone introduces the law to ban all proof of work crypto, the better - or at least banning companies from taking or using PoW crypto would be a good start
Can anyone clarify for me why/how this incentivizes SSDs over HDDs? Seems if it's really just about having "proof of space", whatever HDD is cheapest would make sense? How much data gets read back how fast during validation?
It's the initial generation of the 'plots' that make up the proof of space that's disc IO limited. So faster SSDs for that and then moved onto HDDs for long-term. According to Chia, it uses 332 GB to generate a 101.3 GB proof of space:
First we had proof of work, now we have proof of space. Both are rather wasteful.
The challenge appears to be to create a proof of something beneficial for society, like "proof of clean energy generated", "proof of not flying", "proof of vegan lifestyle" or "proof of CO2 sequestered".
Just bought a new Synology NAS this week and started putting together disks and they're scarce and the prices are through the roof.
Couldn't find what I was planning on buying. What I found was through the roof. I bit the bullet and bought 4 new ones. Not enough to fully populate the NAS, but at least it'll give me some space for now to do what I need.
We've seen scarcity and what it does for prices after the flooding in.. 2010?(ish).
I just did some NAS upgrades a month ago and feel as if I dodged a bullet.
I'm curious what you ended up paying. I bought drives on sale, and got nine 16TB external drives to shuck (one is a spare) for ~$2250 USD taxed and shipped.
I will warn you though that burn-in testing is going to take a while. I did a very exhaustive test[1]... and two drives at a time over USB3 it took about twelve calendar days to test them all before I put them into service.
-- ----- ----- ----- -----
[1] Write out block pattern, read back. 2 hour break. Head thrash random writes/reads for 2 hours. 2 hour break. Head thrash random writes/reads for 2 hours.
Why would Chia be the threat here? Filecoin(IPFS) is already a threat, it already has a capacity of 4.81 EiB of data, 4810 PetiBytes! (Is that how you spell it? In contrast to Petabytes)
And to store 1 GiB of data per year it only costs the user $0.00082 USD.
That shows harddrives are already being gobbled up by miners at an incredible rate. Has this made a noticeable rise in storage prices? Anyone know of any data that can show that?
I don't blame the people buying up the GPUs to mine these cryptocurrencies but the vendors who allow them to do. It is absolutely criminal that they don't filter out these miners when they sell these products. They can easily make it possibly to only allow maybe 1 or 2 of these computers are shipped to a certain address or only one graphics card per a credit card. Whatever way they choose. Even putting a captcha to knock out the robo buyers would probably be enough.
They have an obligation to video game makers, hospitals, and other businesses to sell them so that people that need them for other purposes can purchase them at reasonable prices. It's also on the govt to make sure that this happens.
[+] [-] cwyers|4 years ago|reply
[1] Who uses Bitcoin for peer-to-peer payments? And the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it exists right now, far from allowing people to transact without third parties, is driving a cambrian explosion in third parties, because most people are incapable of transacting Bitcoin themselves.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27008295 - May 2021 (106 comments)
SSD makers start warning that mining products like ChiaCoin will void warranty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001848 - May 2021 (381 comments)
Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26975734 - April 2021 (151 comments)
New Chia coin crypto with Proof of Space may create shortage of storage device - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26879278 - April 2021 (19 comments)
Chia Blockchain mainnet successfully launched today at 14:00 UTC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26515025 - March 2021 (14 comments)
[+] [-] RealityVoid|4 years ago|reply
Overall, I am inclined to say that this is a submarine and HN is falling for it.
Regardless, more to the point of the article, the argument and moral panic rings hollow. Chia just incentives other people to store data for people who want to store data. The place, overhead and mechanism of data retrieval is different, but, still, someone wants to store the data there and they pay for it. So how then is this more of a threat than cloud providers for example?
Later Edit: I mistook Chia as having a similar approach as Filecoin, but, on closer inspection, it seems that they do not store data people want they just store data to prove it's stored and use that to distribute mining rewards. So I was wrong at this end. Still, I maintain my opinion this is a submarine.
[+] [-] Igelau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surround|4 years ago|reply
I'm having the same issue with understanding proof-of-space. Could someone give a technical explanation for those of us that understand basic cryptography (but aren't professional cryptographists)?
[+] [-] chade|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylersmith|4 years ago|reply
Say the network has seen 1TB of data before with hash H. It can generate a random number as a challenge, and request a miner to prove they have access to the 1TB worth of pre-image at the same time it has access to the random challenge. The only way for a miner to compute such a proof is to have the 1TB of data stored somewhere.
[+] [-] tromp|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-min...
[+] [-] wmf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plank_time|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schmichael|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tintor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tolbish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsiebert|4 years ago|reply
Bitcoin is proof of work, which of course requires a lot of electricity.
Some coins, like Neo/CutCoin are proof of stake, which basically let you stake some money, which I guess you can't spend and use that to handle transactions, so instead of running mining rigs, you just stake the money and earn a return. Ethereum is planning to move to proof of stake. Kinda like how your FDIC insured bank can loan your deposit out.
Chiacoin, is proof of space and time, IE proof of assigned storage through the use of stored data, plus a verified delay function (slow to calculate, fast to verify hashing basically). The latter part needs only one processor, so whoever calculates fastest is accepted, so you aren't running a bunch of miners racing to benefit.
I'm not sure that I see the benefit of proof of space and time except in the case of things like filecoin, where you are basically paid for storing stuff on your hard drive without changing it. Chia coin is, if I understand things correctly, just sticking random numbers on a SDD to "farm" them. I mean the VDF stuff is cool to be sure, but it seems like in the case of Chia it's just wasting memory space with random numbers rather then incentivizing storage of existing data.
Is there a better system than proof of stake, in terms of just not being absurdly wasteful in terms of energy or storage capacity?
For the purpose of responsible disclosure, I do have less than $20 bucks of ethereum atm, and that's the only amount of any coin mentioned above. I have no investments in the companies behind any of the above coins.
[+] [-] Graffur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorkwood|4 years ago|reply
This seems like an ad for Chia disguised as a hit piece. It doesn't help that the author's only other article is trying to pump Dogecoin.
[+] [-] Igelau|4 years ago|reply
"Terran life took a sudden dramatic shift after the fall of Hominid dominance. The turning point appears to have occured when the sacrificial demands of Blockchain worship spiraled out of control after fuel-based offerings were supplanted by info storage based offerings. This, in and of itself, was not terribly harmful, but the model was used by the Cult of Aquaricoin. The so-called Water Miners enshrined a marketplace for non-fungible indulgences depicting popular figures. This was backed by a Proof of Potable Water algorithmic catechism, and swiftly resulted in total extinction for the species.
It is this researcher's opinion that we are fortunate the Terran Hominids had only just discovered space travel, for they very well could have extinguished the resources of our own homeworlds for such religious decadence."
[+] [-] rektide|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xhrpost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conradev|4 years ago|reply
https://www.orchid.com/
You can run a node and sell bandwidth to people who want to proxy traffic through your node
[+] [-] causality0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noch|4 years ago|reply
https://pkt.cash/ exists "built to incentivize the growth of infrastructure," and "PKT Network is designed to decentralize internet access around the world by enabling anyone to become an ISP." [0]
A key component of the PKT Network is cjdns (https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns).
[0]: https://pkt.cash/PKT_Network_v1.0_2021.02.01.pdf
[+] [-] ezoe|4 years ago|reply
A) Let everyone have their fair share of bandwidth
B) with DPI, choke other miners so I'm relatively better in the whole miners.
Also, bandwidth will be wasted just for the sake of proof-of-work instead of traditional work that have real values on its own.
[+] [-] Glench|4 years ago|reply
Basically the designers saw how easily many Ethereum/Solidity contracts were hacked and saw that stateful side effects were the main culprit so they made their language have no side effects! Pretty cool.
[+] [-] theshadowknows|4 years ago|reply
1 point by theshadowknows 4 days ago | parent [–] | on: The Last Days of Satoshi: What Happened When Bitco...
Bitcoin and other crypto/alt currencies are so interesting to me. Partly because I do not understand them: If I mow your lawn and you pay me in the locally accepted fiat then I can use that fiat to buy hotdogs and fuel for my lawn mower because the gas station itself will accept that fiat. The gas station will accept that fiat because its vendors, creditors, and employees also accept it. And the chain goes on. If however I mow your lawn and you pay me in bitcoin I'll need to find a gas station that accepts it. Many likely exist. But, how many of their vendors, creditors, and employees also accept it? Some, no doubt, but I'd wager not all would. So, even though these currencies no doubt represent massive potential they're still somewhat limited in terms of adoption. Obviously this is becoming less true over time which I think is a good thing - competition isn't something fiat currencies tend to have to deal with, but they sure could use it. My real misunderstanding is 'why' people accept these currencies in the first place. In other words - people accept a United States dollar because it is worth one United States dollar. However, it seems that most people accept bitcoin (or bitcoin fragments) not because they are worth some percentage of bitcoin but exactly because they are worth some amount of United States dollars. Is that true? Is the primary reason that bitcoin has become more popular that an investor can spend 10,000 fiat on it - wait a year - and then extract 15,000 fiat from it?
[+] [-] joecool1029|4 years ago|reply
Some of us did. Last month marks 10 years since I was introduced to the community and registered on the bitcoin-otc. We bought and sold all sorts of random crap (food items, laptops, gadgets, one regular even paid people bitcoin to have them buy him lunch. A brief time existed where some of the more idealists expected bitcoin to replace Paypal. That obviously didn't happen.
Starting with Satoshidice gambling the network performance started to crap up and fees began to climb. Eventually it became worthless for any sort of fast/cheap transacting and everything centralized onto a few exchanges. Every asshole in the world has proposed ways to improve this issue, but with all the money sunk into bitcoin and a lot of arguments we aren't in a better situation today.
Now every naive person from 20-some year olds to 70-year olds are hitting me up and asking what I think of NFT's and the shitcoin of the week because they saw some heads on Bloomberg gushing over it and I'm just tired of it all.
[+] [-] wmf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deckplecksetter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonewareslord|4 years ago|reply
From their homepage:
> Examples include protein structure prediction (Rosetta@home), mapping the Milky Way galaxy (Milkyway@home), and tackling problems in public health and clean energy (World Community Grid).
[+] [-] christiansakai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmlnr|4 years ago|reply
https://www.newsbtc.com/news/foldingcoin-where-people-mine-p...
Things that would make sense:
- SETI@homeCoin, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home
- ArchiveCoin, ala https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
These would actually be useful.
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lousken|4 years ago|reply
thanks, miners
the sooner someone introduces the law to ban all proof of work crypto, the better - or at least banning companies from taking or using PoW crypto would be a good start
[+] [-] arcticbull|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaginal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mNovak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThatPlayer|4 years ago|reply
https://www.chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html
[+] [-] Tepix|4 years ago|reply
The challenge appears to be to create a proof of something beneficial for society, like "proof of clean energy generated", "proof of not flying", "proof of vegan lifestyle" or "proof of CO2 sequestered".
[+] [-] rovr138|4 years ago|reply
Couldn't find what I was planning on buying. What I found was through the roof. I bit the bullet and bought 4 new ones. Not enough to fully populate the NAS, but at least it'll give me some space for now to do what I need.
We've seen scarcity and what it does for prices after the flooding in.. 2010?(ish).
[+] [-] MrFoof|4 years ago|reply
I'm curious what you ended up paying. I bought drives on sale, and got nine 16TB external drives to shuck (one is a spare) for ~$2250 USD taxed and shipped.
I will warn you though that burn-in testing is going to take a while. I did a very exhaustive test[1]... and two drives at a time over USB3 it took about twelve calendar days to test them all before I put them into service.
-- ----- ----- ----- -----
[1] Write out block pattern, read back. 2 hour break. Head thrash random writes/reads for 2 hours. 2 hour break. Head thrash random writes/reads for 2 hours.
[+] [-] Tepix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|4 years ago|reply
Crypto verse in general feels like a 50/50 bet...but the storage based stuff feels like significantly worse odds
[+] [-] gverrilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cozzyd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisClark|4 years ago|reply
And to store 1 GiB of data per year it only costs the user $0.00082 USD.
That shows harddrives are already being gobbled up by miners at an incredible rate. Has this made a noticeable rise in storage prices? Anyone know of any data that can show that?
[+] [-] m00dy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpdev_63|4 years ago|reply
They have an obligation to video game makers, hospitals, and other businesses to sell them so that people that need them for other purposes can purchase them at reasonable prices. It's also on the govt to make sure that this happens.
Just my 2 cents.