Chia cryptocurrency. Possible storage shortages coming.

SeanW

Haven't seen a thread on this so far, but being stuck in Covidland, I've had a lot of time to follow tech news on YouTube especially the ongoing dumpster fire that is the PC hardware shortages mess. So far, we've been dealing with shortages mainly of graphics cards and to a lesser extent CPUs especially from AMD.

Unfortunately, while we may get some relief from GPU shortages as supply ramps up and Ethereum mining profits come into question, there may soon be an issue with a new cryptocurrency, Chia, which uses a system of proof-of-space-and-time system to reward miners that leave hard drives and/or SSDs available to store data and keep them connected to the Chia network. Some tech youtubers had been flagging this for a while, as in some parts of the world, some types of storage are starting to increase in price and become scarce even before the Chia currency was tradeable. Unfortunately, Chia has now gone live, I saw somewhere it had a price target of $20 per Chia coin, but in initial trading has gone to more than 20 times that. As such, I'd expect a lot of mining concerns to grab all the storage they can like they've done with GPUs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np8rgXSdYMM

To be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone here should panic buy, speculate or starting hoarding storage, but if anyone here has been planning a storage upgrade or something, it might be a good idea to proceed with that upgrade sooner rather than later.

AlmightyCushion

Crypto needs to fúck off and die.

Overheal

I have some Itchy and Scratchy Money left to sell if anyone's interested

the_syco

From what I've read, it's pretty intensive read/write.

So am guessing WD black & red will be used, followed possibly by purple. Can't see them using WD green. Can also see them also avoiding QLC SSD's.

Syferus

I'm thinking about throwing together a few spare drives and a Raspberry Pi to try out Chia. Unlike GPU mining the system running the mining/'farming' doesn't need to be particularly powerful to be effective.

zom

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Crypto needs to fúck off and die.

It is strongly connected with black market and other gray area activity like gambling. The only chance is it will get replaced by something else (quantum computing?)

K.O.Kiki

Syferus wrote: »

I'm thinking about throwing together a few spare drives and a Raspberry Pi to try out Chia. Unlike GPU mining the system running the mining/'farming' doesn't need to be particularly powerful to be effective.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/n8cmbo/several_ssds_started_to_die_with_chia_mining/

Probably not a good idea.

We need to make crypto non convertible. Yeh let them sell it to each other or buy with a direct debit but no cashing out.

smacl

Ordered up a couple of 2TB pny nvme drives a couple of weeks ago and installed them over the weekend. Had wanted Samsung 970s but stocks were low and prices high. Why they ship these drives without a spare latch screw baffles and frustrates me. I had one spare, but for the second drive ended up making a washer for a glasses screw as a temporary fix until I can order a few in. PITA.

Syferus

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/n8cmbo/several_ssds_started_to_die_with_chia_mining/

Probably not a good idea.

I have just built a PC so I already an decent older build with an M.2 sitting idle. I've only needed to buy a few large capacity spinning disc drives.

What you earn from farming far exceeds the cost of an SSD. Chia writes large plots to the SSD before transferring to a spinning disc for storage so it's obviously going to be taxing on SSDs, failure is built into the calculations.

Inviere

The amount of waste this will cause....production of ssd's and hdds, shipping of drives to retailers, shipping to customers, chia farming, wear out drive in a matter of weeks/months, earn a few quid.

GPU mining is bad enough, but at least gpus aren't only lasting a few months doing it. This is just going too far now.

Serephucus

So far as I understand Chia, it involves writing a tonne of data for the "compute" phase, then only perma-storing around 100MB or so.
Why not just RAM disk it?


Just in case you thought RAM was safe from all this.

Spear

Serephucus wrote: »

So far as I understand Chia, it involves writing a tonne of data for the "compute" phase, then only perma-storing around 100MB or so.
Why not just RAM disk it?


Just in case you thought RAM was safe from all this.

Not quite. I've been messing with it and some old disks over the last few days.

It creates nearly 300GB in temp files, then compresses them to a single static 100GB file called a plot. So RAM disks really aren't an option for that scale.

H3llR4iser

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Crypto needs to fúck off and die.

At this point there's a legitimate question to ask about the whole Crypto fad thing - is it really just a well meaning idea, thought out by some naive tech nerds, that got totally out of hand as soon as the money spinners of the world took a whiff of it?

Because...looking at it now, it frankly seems like the whole concept was carefully crafted as means to generate a ridiculously volatile market, creating huge opportunities for speculators - while getting off the hook on the basis of letting the occasional "little guy" make some cash, especially in the very initial phase.

AlmightyCushion

H3llR4iser wrote: »

At this point there's a legitimate question to ask about the whole Crypto fad thing - is it really just a well meaning idea, thought out by some naive tech nerds, that got totally out of hand as soon as the money spinners of the world took a whiff of it?



Because...looking at it now, it frankly seems like the whole concept was carefully crafted as means to generate a ridiculously volatile market, creating huge opportunities for speculators - while getting off the hook on the basis of letting the occasional "little guy" make some cash, especially in the very initial phase.

The whole thing is nuts. A few years ago I seen a thread on bargain alerts (I think) reminding people to check their free XLMs they got a few years ago because he checked his wallet and it was worth $1200. I had 0 XLMs at the time but found a few sites giving them away for signing up so I signed up. In total I got about $200 worth. XLMs have gone up 5 fold in value since then. My freebie coins are worth over $1,000. The coins the guy in bargain alerts had, if he kept them, are worth $6,000. That is totally crazy. I'm not even sure what these XLMs can even be used for. I'm going to hold on to them but this still seems like a crazy bubble that will crash and more or less disappear. Most of these coins have no utility and the only reason people have them is because price++.

Skerries

I think I signed up for that, how did you go about getting them?

AlmightyCushion

Skerries wrote: »

I think I signed up for that, how did you go about getting them?

In my case I logged into they were in my Blockchain and keybase app. I never uninstalled them from my phone so they're still there. I'm going to look at seeing if I can access the wallets outside of these apps on case the apps go tits up.

Inviere

This crypto business is getting ridiculous now. Last week this was just over a euro....today it was €8.75...




Jokes aside, I bit the bullet on a 14TB WD Elements there last week on Amazon UK who had them at a nice price the other day. I want to move to dual-parity in my Unraid build, but this Chia thing has forced my hand earlier than I wanted to. I think last year around November I bought a 14TB off Amazon for ~€240ish....it's crazy where things are now, I paid about €360 (inc import fees) for this new one. It's listed for €490 now on Amazon.de & sold by them!

I also recently bought x2 8TB WD Elements drives to add into my cold-backup pool. I seen these a few months ago on Amazon for €125 each. Bought two of them recently for €320 all in, and that's with import tax, so not overly bad. These are listed on Amazon.de for €220 each today.

Crypto can just fook right off at this stage

SeanW

From what I've seen, the jury seems to be in as to what the story is with these things. Consumer SSDs are likely not going to be demanded in great numbers for Chia plotting because the amount of writing will exhaust the TBW of a drive within weeks. Industrial SSDs wouldn't be much better. And only a fool or someone uneducated would spend significant money on something they're going to turn into e-waste in a short time.

But high capacity hard drives could be very useful, and they could be used for fast and safe Chia plotting if arranged in multiple in RAID arrays. That's where the crunch is likely to happen. If you need a high capacity hard drive any time in the near future, might be a good idea to get it now, if you still can.

Also I'm seeing cryptocurrency starting to tank. Ethereum back under €2000 Long may it continue.

the_syco

SeanW wrote: »

Also I'm seeing cryptocurrency starting to tank. Ethereum back under €2000 Long may it continue.

Probably only a temporary dip due to how some people perceive Chinas latest "clamp down" on Bitcoin mining.

smacl

the_syco wrote: »

Probably only a temporary dip due to how some people perceive Chinas latest "clamp down" on Bitcoin mining.

Seems likely it will tank again at some point as has been the case previously. If they manage to get a quantum computer to shortcut SHA-256 computations, that's goodbye to bitcoin and quite a few other POW systems.