Somebody needs to invent a coin that works on proof-of-carbon-emission-reductions, or proof-of-global-poverty-reduction and do some real good for the world.
That one is fun! First, I credibly claim to have plans to release ridiculous quantities of CO2, and then you negotiate with me to convince me not to. Then we can split the coins.
That’s actually pretty simple if you can live with centralization ... just certify CO2 offsets for example for each coin purchased. Then again ... what’s the point of putting that on a blockchain?
This defeats the purpose of disincentivizing adversaries who want to steal coins from other participants. The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus. You can't redirect those resources into "doing some real good in the world" the best you can do is to allocate resources directly to your good cause rather than trying to magically get the good done for free.
Set up a coin such that every time it goes up, some amount of reserve is sold, and 100% of profits donated to carbon reduction projects. Give away free electric cars. Plant trees. Whatever.
Then hype up the coin. Make people bid it up endlessly just like they do other coins. Post lots of #moon #hodl crap on Twitter. Get the flock of sheep moving.
Folding@home and SETI@home and The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search already existed and could have had big nerds turn them into robot money somehow but naahhhhh. Of course not.
I’m sure all the crypto fans are lining up around the block to tell us that their pet technology doesn’t waste valuable resources, it just uses storage that would otherwise have gone unused, as they do with Bitcoin and electricity.
I think it's funny how the world as a whole just simply moves the problem (excess resource usage for something a lot of people have deemed 'excessive' like bitcoin mining) from one type of resource to another. Now we're going to see storage costs skyrocket, which will (hopefully not) affect cloud storage providers, datacenters, etc. etc. etc.
I'm extremely disappointed Bram Cohen is behind this. I used to really admire him for his work on Bittorrent but this is going to be an indelible asterisk on his legacy as a coder.
Perhaps the "paperclip maximizer" doomsday scenario was right in was right in its broad strokes but just wrong about the agents involved? They were worried about a super-competent AI that burns resources producing low-utility widgets. In fact we have created an system (a combination of societal incentive structures and technological tools) that burns resources producing low-utility pseudo-random numbers.
Some people think Chia is so much better because of it uses SSD / Storage rather than GPU. I think this could be far worse.
Not everyone needs a GPGPU, but everyone need NAND and SSD. And it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see something similar to chip shortage. The DRAM Fab which could be quickly retooled to NAND will be part of this equation as well.
> And it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see something similar to chip shortage.
Nah. The expected ROI on a given TiB of storage is halved with each doubling of Netspace[0][1]. The current return is ~$1.50/TiB/Day. As the expected return declines, farming CHIA will become less attractive than other crypto 'investment' opportunities, and the whales will turn their attention elsewhere.
I'm guessing that netspace starts to level out after another doubling or two--assuming the exchange rate remains the same.
Yeah, the problem is actually worse. Bitcoin is energy intensive. Chia is capital intensive. Producing capital costs energy so it effectively boils down to proof of work (burning energy to produce HDDs and SSDs). However, scaling energy is very easy, scaling HDD production is very difficult.
The only benefit is that storage can be repurposed very easily, thus booms and busts may cause temporary oversupply of storage.
Not good indeed. Small hosting businesses and consumer storage will suffer, because big cloud companies usualy have HW production customized and contracted ahead.
Technically plotting is the really bad part, farming mostly just occupies storage and uses a bit of CPU. Not that I personally am a fan of either, but plotting is the destructive part and then you 'farm' the completed plot forever and that can be done on inexpensive spinning rust drives by a cheap PC.
Proof of Space is just Proof of Work by another means. Honestly, I'd rather just have (electric) PoW -- at least the energy source could be green, and any green energy capacity built out for PoW can be repurposed.
I read the headline as China rather than Chia and was wondering what China was plotting to farm now. Frankly it was much more interesting than Chia bad, no Chia for you.
To me the only explanation of this fad (or scam) is pure greed. That information smog producing period of time will be recalled in history books like the coal race with smog cities of early XX century.
Useful Proof of Storage cryptos like Siacoin or Filecoin should be more incentivised. They store meaningful data.
This reminds me of how Steve Jobs would talk about the need for liberal arts influence in technology. I feel like so much of this blockchain and cryptocurrency stuff is made purely looking at the tech, with either no thought to the actual incentives involved, or a total misunderstanding of them.
> This reminds me of how Steve Jobs would talk about the need for liberal arts influence in technology.
I mean, in this case, you really just need engineering (in the traditional sense) influence. Engineering as a discipline covers considering this sort of thing.
Farming: you hold massive (101GB) bingo cards of mathematical proofs on your hard drive. When you receive a challenge, you first do a pre-filter on your bingo cards to see which of them could contain a proof. Within that filtered list, you find the closest proofs. The peer with the closest proof available wins the challenge and [currently] gets 2XCH.
Plotting: you fill your free space with bingo cards. You need 300-400GB of free temporary space and TBs of writes in that space. This uses a lot of compute and eats SSDs for breakfast.
Once you have filled your space (assuming you don't go out and buy more disks), you can stop plotting. This is where the claimed "greenness" of Chia comes into play: you eventually stop using compute resources. Of course, there are whales who are adding drives to their servers daily.
Plotting is an compute- and IO-intensive process which eventually generates a ~100 GB block of data after a large number of read/write operations to that data. This is the part of the process that involves (and destroys) SSDs.
Farming is a slower process which is performed on those blocks of data, which involves occasional read operations on small sections of that data. The data blocks are typically transferred to slower bulk storage (like hard disks) for this.
If you'd like it in video format, [this one][1] explains it in layman terms quite well and covers possible ways to mitigate the ssd endurance problem, as well as expected profit rates with the right "commodity" hardwares.
>Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks
Is this true? Back in 2015, techreport tested a bunch of SSDs to failure and it took 18 months to kill them all. This was a while ago, but I'd been lead to believe write endurance had only improved since then.
If you were an alien species worried about the rise of humans, you couldn't invent a better technology than crypto currency to cause us to kill ourselves.
There's been an absolute metric crap-ton of interest generated since the media has started picking it up and taking about it 2-3 weeks ago. It seems like it's one of the first crypto offerings that relies not on constant CPU/GPU usage, but just proof of "storage" from what I understand.
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefftk|4 years ago|reply
That one is fun! First, I credibly claim to have plans to release ridiculous quantities of CO2, and then you negotiate with me to convince me not to. Then we can split the coins.
[+] [-] c1sc0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
[+] [-] arebop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gre|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|4 years ago|reply
Then hype up the coin. Make people bid it up endlessly just like they do other coins. Post lots of #moon #hodl crap on Twitter. Get the flock of sheep moving.
Sell hype, use the proceeds for CO2 reduction.
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1-more|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...
[+] [-] jasonlaramburu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scohesc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp8964|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liaukovv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbdumas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jareklupinski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nullabillity|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
Not everyone needs a GPGPU, but everyone need NAND and SSD. And it already causes price hike for SSD we will soon see something similar to chip shortage. The DRAM Fab which could be quickly retooled to NAND will be part of this equation as well.
This is not good.
[+] [-] marcusverus|4 years ago|reply
Nah. The expected ROI on a given TiB of storage is halved with each doubling of Netspace[0][1]. The current return is ~$1.50/TiB/Day. As the expected return declines, farming CHIA will become less attractive than other crypto 'investment' opportunities, and the whales will turn their attention elsewhere.
I'm guessing that netspace starts to level out after another doubling or two--assuming the exchange rate remains the same.
[0]https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/netspace [1]https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
The only benefit is that storage can be repurposed very easily, thus booms and busts may cause temporary oversupply of storage.
[+] [-] dheera|4 years ago|reply
I have a pile of old spare 512GB SSDs and it looks like I would able to make something like $2/day. Not even enough for a coffee.
Same with Ethereum. Tried to mine with my Titan V. 31 MH/s. Also not even enough for a coffee.
This is meaningless, and cryptocurrencies are effectively centralized around mining farms with ASICs.
[+] [-] imhoguy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulzeraj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inshadows|4 years ago|reply
Seriously, anyone compared the capacity of Chia and beloved cloud providers?
[+] [-] Thaxll|4 years ago|reply
wow.
[+] [-] awat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpetry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiredfool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevingadd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|4 years ago|reply
Woah, really?
[+] [-] jude-|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1-more|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl2718|4 years ago|reply
I need to look into this more, but I think this is an implementation issue. It should buffer in RAM to require only one write pass.
Edit: I was wrong. They set a minimum k that wouldn’t easily fit in ram.
[+] [-] jakedata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gok|4 years ago|reply
Ok Chia is stupid but this means that you are not pricing your SSD I/O properly.
[+] [-] imhoguy|4 years ago|reply
Useful Proof of Storage cryptos like Siacoin or Filecoin should be more incentivised. They store meaningful data.
[+] [-] kelp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killingtime74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|4 years ago|reply
I mean, in this case, you really just need engineering (in the traditional sense) influence. Engineering as a discipline covers considering this sort of thing.
[+] [-] vineyardmike|4 years ago|reply
What is plotting? How does farming a plot work?
Edit: Why do people plot with SSDs? Is there a speed element to it?
[+] [-] zamalek|4 years ago|reply
Plotting: you fill your free space with bingo cards. You need 300-400GB of free temporary space and TBs of writes in that space. This uses a lot of compute and eats SSDs for breakfast.
Once you have filled your space (assuming you don't go out and buy more disks), you can stop plotting. This is where the claimed "greenness" of Chia comes into play: you eventually stop using compute resources. Of course, there are whales who are adding drives to their servers daily.
[+] [-] duskwuff|4 years ago|reply
Plotting is an compute- and IO-intensive process which eventually generates a ~100 GB block of data after a large number of read/write operations to that data. This is the part of the process that involves (and destroys) SSDs.
Farming is a slower process which is performed on those blocks of data, which involves occasional read operations on small sections of that data. The data blocks are typically transferred to slower bulk storage (like hard disks) for this.
[+] [-] fbcpck|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4
[+] [-] rozab|4 years ago|reply
Is this true? Back in 2015, techreport tested a bunch of SSDs to failure and it took 18 months to kill them all. This was a while ago, but I'd been lead to believe write endurance had only improved since then.
https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
[+] [-] Rodeoclash|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellow0rldz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meepmorp|4 years ago|reply
Judging by the graph in the article, it was 1 exabyte in late April, under a month ago. Wow.
[+] [-] Vespasian|4 years ago|reply
It is really just speculation fever?
[+] [-] scohesc|4 years ago|reply
Very interesting.