Monday, April 19th 2021

Chia - The Cryptocurrency Gunning for Your SSD and HDD Space That Could Bring Another Tech Sector Pricing Up

A new cryptocurrency going by the name of Chia could bring about a boom in demand for HDD and SSD, which have been kept relatively untouched by the latest mining and supply constraints. However, optimistic predictions of falling prices for NAND (optimistic for consumers, that is) could prove to be erroneous. Apparently, the new cryptocurrency, which saw its whitepaper being published in February 9th and has already led to shortages of high-performance SSDs from China's Jiahe Jinwei.

The cryptocurrency was designed to be mined in SSDs and HDDs, looking to cut on electricity cost from proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and (still) Ethereum. The intention is for the cryptocurrency to have as broad an appeal as possible, by excluding the need for prohibitive investments in either ASICs (for Bitcoin) or GPUs (for Ethereum and other Dagger/Hashimoto-based calculations). It also leverages that which is most widely available and oftentimes left empty of any workload - storage space. Due to this, it's been reported that Chinese miners are already buying HDDs (4 TB through to 18 TB) and SSDs (mainly NVMe solutions) in bulk. This could prevent technologists from ushering in the current trend of falling storage pricing - if demand becomes as crazy as it has become in the GPU space.
Chia was designed by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, and uses a specific type of consensus and ledger-assurance system that's described as Proofs of Space and Time. The blockchain is farmed via Proof of Space, which is done inside your HDD or SSD via computing through already-in-storage models, and then contacts Chia's servers for Proof of Time - which essentially ensures that a required amount of time has passed between the block's generation and its actual inclusion in the network, to prevent any ill-intentioned farmer from assuming control of the network.

There are several advantages to farming a cryptocurrency such as Chia over the more general proof of work models. HDDs and SSDs take up much lesser space than a rack of GPUs, whilst consuming much less power, generating much less heat and noise, and thus allowing for much higher scalings in farming scenarios (which is what Chia calls its mining, because it's more ecologically sustainable than the usual mining workloads).
Sources: Chia Project Home, via Tom's Hardware
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101 Comments on Chia - The Cryptocurrency Gunning for Your SSD and HDD Space That Could Bring Another Tech Sector Pricing Up

#1
TheLostSwede
News Editor
Good thing I have 11TB spare on my NAS then...
Posted on Reply
#2
64K
Hell, if miners could find a way to mine crypto from programmable coffee makers then there would be no coffee makers for sale anywhere except from scalpers charging 3 times the MSRP.
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#3
randompeep
And I was thankfull for the decline of storage prices' over the last 5 years or so...
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#5
Valantar
Yet another demonstration that crypto is nothing more than a race to invent ever new stuff for people to invest in gamble on. Utter f*****g waste in every single concievable way. Making the rich richer, screwing over the planet (production of SSDs also pollutes, after all, and e-waste is a major problem already), but of course this is "liberating" people from some undefinable "oppression". The ideological BS surrounding this is still staggering to me. It's just another way to maintain the status quo of predatory capitalism.
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#7
efikkan
Can someone please invent a cryptocurrency that runs on stupidity?
- The only infinite resource humanity possesses…
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#8
Makaveli
hmm so I will have to grab another Seagate Iron Wolf to throw in the Nas alittle sooner than I expected.
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#9
windwhirl
Valantarbut of course this is "liberating" people from some undefinable "oppression
IMO, all these coins attack a problem that doesn't exist.
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#10
DeathtoGnomes
and after this, it will be your keyboard or even your mouse... :shadedshu:
Posted on Reply
#11
spectatorx
Since long time it already was possible to mine on hdds and ssds:
So i wouldn't be pessimistic about this new coin, it may fail as literally hundreds if not thousands of cryptocoins failed. Basically all is about success of such coin: it succeeds? Prices and availability of storage are going to end up in gpus way. The coin fails? Nothing changes and storage prices keep getting lower as they are all the time.

That's how burstcoin ended:
coinmarketcap.com/currencies/burst/
Not profitable at all. Chia most likely will be the same.
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#12
Night
Hey, I got an idea... why don't you mine on this?!

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#13
Valantar
NightHey, I got an idea... why don't you mine on this?!

Here's a suggestion for truly environmentally friendly crypto: make the blockchain analogue, have the proof of stake be that someone comes over to your house to check that you are still physically in posession of the thing in question. Have them write it down in a publicly available ledger. After all the actual """"""work"""""" done in crypto mining purely serves to demonstrate that "hey, I own X amount of product Y, plz reward me accordingly". If they just skipped the entire part where this equipment needs to be turned on doing meaningless busywork we'd skip a major portion of the environmental damage caused. And we wouldn't have a bunch of holes in the ground either ;)
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#14
MadMan007
Can't wait for governments to ban this shit....block chain is an interesting programming technology, all this currency stuff is dogshit though.
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#15
Hargema
Can they get lost already
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#16
CheapMeat
Burstcoin and other storage coins ARE profitable now, that's the point. Bitcoin didn't reach $64,000 when that video came out. I can tell you don't understand financial gains off all this. Burst coin was $0.001 before the current boom. Now it's $0.012. in your head you're thinking how pathetic, it's still under a dollar, not profitable. But you're so wrong. $500 at $00.1 is now at least $2500 at $0.012. That's massive! All the coins under a dollar are huge life changing gains compared to $64,000k BTC reaching $100,00k now. Sadly, this is what basically everyone does when the world cares about money above all else. There are many people who'd rather mine than live off minimum wage or go to work 40hrs a week with an hour or more drive and back. Basically everyone is trying to find a way to get out of basically slavery and find true freedom. And lots and lots of people have made hundreds of thousands to millions now since coins went from example $0.002 to $1, that's massive. The current crypto scene is at it's all time high. So everyone is chasing the next cheap one to pump and dump. That's how it works if you want to gain quickly instead of waiting 40+ years to retire and live on Social Security. I'm just going to assume the naysayers are well off right now and financially in a good place, so don't truly care. I'm not a fan of all our PC hardware costing more of course, heck I buy used parts because that's what I used to be able to afford and now even used is 2x/3x the price. I'll never get my dream builds now. But I totally understand what's going on and why.
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#17
windwhirl
DeathtoGnomesand after this, it will be your keyboard or even your mouse... :shadedshu:
I laugh, but I hope you're wrong.
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#18
1d10t
DeathtoGnomesand after this, it will be your keyboard or even your mouse... :shadedshu:
Hashrate determine from word per minute and click per second :roll:
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#19
rainxh11
Blockchain, cryptocurrency, this technologies have proven to bring more harm than good over the past decade
bitcoin, what was to be a revolutionary currency to replace the printed out of nothing paper money
is now a commodity people gambling with, it is used as anything but being a currency, sucking up electricity and silicon resources like there's no tomorrow, crypto mining is being to the environment, far more than real mining, what an irony
nobody will spend a currency to buy anything if that currency value keep doubling, tripling, halving in a mere of months
the only people who benefiting are the already corrupt and wealthy wall street guys and bankers,
using to launder money, use it as an offshore private account,
cryptocurrencies proved to be a mere other tool to keep the status quo
Posted on Reply
#20
R-T-B
This is going nowhere fast. Nice clickbait outrage though.
rainxh11Blockchain, cryptocurrency, this technologies have proven to bring more harm than good over the past decade
bitcoin, what was to be a revolutionary currency to replace the printed out of nothing paper money
is now a commodity people gambling with, it is used as anything but being a currency
nobody will spend a currency to buy anything if that currency value keep doubling, tripling, halving in a mere of months
the only people who benefiting are the already corrupt and wealthy wall street guys and bankers,
using to launder money, use it as an offshore private account,
cryptocurrencies proved to be a mere other tool to keep the status quo
I have used it as a currency in the past, but sadly I think you are right about it's present direction.
Posted on Reply
#21
Metroid
hahahahahha, now they are trying to make hds and ssd's expensive like gpu's ehhe, they want to inflate the price of those to earn money from idiots hehe.
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#22
Tomgang
Good God, will this crypto nightmare never end. What's next, mining on smartphones or maybe a calculator. How about a cars build in infotainment systems. That has a cpu two.

I am so sick and tired of this crypto bs. I need my gpu but not for 2-3 times the cost and now soon maybe also storage will cost 2 or 3 times the msrp.

Glad I just ordered a few nvme SSD and a pair of 14 tb HDD. That can keep me going for a while.

I wish for crypto to crash and burn. Sink to the bottom of the ocean and be forgotten forever.
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#23
zlobby
What's next? Crypto mined on PSU or RAM?
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#24
windwhirl
zlobbyWhat's next? Crypto mined on PSU or RAM?
Don't give them ideas.
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#25
Tomgang
zlobbyWhat's next? Crypto mined on PSU or RAM?
Shhh don't give them any new ideas
windwhirlDon't give them ideas.
LOL you where faster.
Posted on Reply
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