To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise SSDs to "farm" a plot. And consumer SSDs can't really stand up to this process long term, so they get killed relatively quick.
A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied off to long term storage (larger, slow hard drives via SATA, USB, etc) where it sits until a given plot of yours "wins". You can run one of these collections of hard drives off a Raspberry Pi.
Fun fact: In other crypto there are pools so that everyone contributing work gets a share of the profit. There are no pools in Chia. You're farming a digital lottery ticket that then sits there using up hard drive space and an always on PC hoping one off your tickets wins.
I researched it a bit so I'd understand the basics and the cost to earnings setup. It's so wasteful of hardware and space that I didn't want to set up a rig, though.
What are some examples of "enterprise SSD"? I actually would like to buy one because I suppose they are way more durable than consumer SSDs, and less likely to die on me. But the closest to "enterprise" that I can find are the samsung pro.
I find it hard to get on board with Chia being a better alternative to Bitcoin because it uses less energy when the tradeoff it makes is the manufacturing and waste of millions of terabytes of hard drives. Does not seem very environmentally friendly to me.
To be fair, there's the plotting phase, and the farming phase.
When farming, disk speed is not critical, just size. Thus the idea of recycling millions of HDDs in a low power scenario. A few seeks here or there on your old, unused terabytes, but you need to have enough space to offer, otherwise your chances are zero. Today's farming is dominated by pools, some using non-official, closed source binaries of unknown origin. Official pooling is, supposedly, coming soon.
Plotting, which is preparing the files that are farmed, is, as of today, extremely IO intensive, but still cheaper, energy-wise, than mining. A single 100GB plot (you need ~20TB to have any chances of farming success) can take hours to plot. So people are resorting to extremely fast SSDs, or NVMe in RAID0 in PCIe 8x/16x cards to slash that time. And, in the process, wearing them out. Can't find the link now, but some were saying normal SSDs are ruined after 6 weeks of 24/7. Plotting keeps improving, although I'm not sure if it's got a lower performance bound by design.
I always thought that if bitcoin crashed, the mining centers could be refactored someway into other use for computing power alone.
Now with this new currency, you could maybe even run cloud storage. Maybe we are accidentally building the futur alternatives to Amazon cloud services.
You don't want any components that have been used in coin mining. Generally, GPUs, desktop CPUs, RAM, consumer disks (both solid stats and spinning rust) and even power supplies are not designed for years of 24x7 100% load.
This is a part of why NVidia cracked down on gpu mining recently - when ASIC mining became more profitable than GPUs, the secondhand market got flooded with cheap high quality cards (thus ruining the primary sale market for new GPUs) and people flooded NVidia support with support queries for slow or unreliable GPUs.
Chia doesn't require running disks at 24x7 100% load. You fill up your storage and then wait until you win the lottery. Most of the time, you won't win and your disk can remain idle.
Drives used for Chia farming both SSD and HDD would have very little use over time. All the discussion around Chia destroying SSD's is when they are used in the initial plotting process which does a huge amount of reads and writes in the process of generating a plot. Once you move those plots to a large capacity spinning disk for farming, there is very little reads on the disk thereafter.
If people invest time/money mining coins, they're going to promote those coins in order to justify their mining operation.
From this initial organic buzz, speculative markets take over and the whole thing becomes a positive feedback loop.
Crypto is fundamentally a huge waste of advanced manufactured goods, electricity, and time, and enables tax avoidance and money laundering. The correct response from Governments is to simply ban the formal exchange of all of them in the same way that the USA bans online gambling and pyramid schemes.
Proof of stake, as implemented in most of its current examples, faces a philosophical problem in that the initial distribution of the token is now a "trust me" premise - a founding organization announces a policy - versus a baked-in labor theory of property concept (I put "work" into this therefore I own it). Coins that transition from one mode to the other, as Etherium is doing, must reckon with friction from miners. Distribution, both in terms of early emission rates and then years later, represents a major quandary.
So, alternative proofs of work still have an interesting basis for speculative valuation and acceptance. In the last crypto bear market, of the top 100 at peak, proof of work coins were the ones that had the smallest drawdowns.
I don't know because I don't understand Proof of Stake well enough to know its weak points and vulnerabilities. I hope it works out, but what do we really know about its security and power dynamics?
A better characterization would be that Bitcoin requires miners to perform vast amounts of hashing in the hopes of finding a hash that is arbitrarily difficult to find.
Just one more tweak is all we need. Instead of just pseudorandom stuff filling these drives, it should be sharded copies of the internet archive, and a distributed search engine.
This is well explained in chia’s documentation. A server issues “challenges” and the harvesters respond if they have the answer to that challenge. Think of it like bingo but with a gazillion squares.
The trick is that calculating the response to a challenge takes a very long time and the server only waits for a very short time to get any valid responses. So it follows that the harvesters must compute the responses in advance and store them on disk, which serves as proof that you had that disk space allocated to chia harvesting.
It's built on large files that act as bingo cards. You have a limited time to respond when you get a bingo. The more cards you have, the more likely you are to win.
They are designed so that precomputing the bingo card is expensive but once you have them, checking to see if you have a bingo is cheap. It's thought that nobody will be able to compute a winning bingo cards on the fly ("grinding"), so it will be cheaper to store and reuse them once you have them.
(I don't know the details of the algorithms though.)
I haven't read any papers about this, so this is just a first speculative guess that I will update if/when I learn more:
I suspect nodes ask one another to perform computations on random subsets of very large amounts of data. Since the subsets requested would be random, nodes can't predict the requests and thus have to store all the data. The data would then be augmented with the consensus results of these computations, so that future computations would be able to reference them.
The way it was explained to me is that when you "farm" your "plots" the first time, you are just generating and writing a lot of numbers that are written in the 100GB plots.
Then the transaction validation is done by whoever finds value in their storage (instead of doing a lot of computations online, they are pre-generated).
I assume there's a bunch of tree-like structures in the middle to make the search faster.
The thing with hard drives: if chia bombs, you can still turn around and sell them on Ebay. And when they're 14tb+ drives, they'll retain their value for a decent time.
you can't do that with miners, and GPU's are still fairly specific components. But plenty of companies and people have all sorts of needs for extra space.
I mean - if we're going to be scaling anything... hard drives are the thing. And if there are any storage optimizations people come up with, those will only benefit the storage industry overall; unlike ASIC miners, for example.
That's only part of the process (precomputing the large files you need to win). Once you have the files, they can be stored anywhere and that storage is only lightly used.
This wouldn't stop an unscrupulous seller from almost wearing out an SSD, then selling it on eBay to an unsuspecting buyer as a "working SSD" and buying a new one
it depends on the drives. CAN you destroy drives by plotting? yes. But other drives can take quite a beating - and generate 40K plots worth of data before reaching failure point.
additionally, farming (serving plots) is done with regular drives, and those are very lightly read from and used once the plots are loaded.
I dislike how articles like this not only don't provide the relevant numbers like percentages, the numbers they do provide are not even the same bases:
"Around 12 million terabytes of hard disc space is currently being used to mine Chia, having risen on an exponential curve since its launch in March. ... Hoffman says that if all hard discs sold in a year – which could hold data totalling roughly 1 zettabyte, or 1 billion terabytes – were used exclusively for mining Chia, it would still use less than 1 per cent of the energy currently used by bitcoin."
Quick, divide 12 million into 1 billion in your head! "Uhhh..." (It's 1.2%.)
>Gene Hoffman, the president of Chia Network, the company behind the currency, admits that “we’ve kind of destroyed the short-term supply chain”, but he denies it will become an environmental drain.
A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied off to long term storage (larger, slow hard drives via SATA, USB, etc) where it sits until a given plot of yours "wins". You can run one of these collections of hard drives off a Raspberry Pi.
Fun fact: In other crypto there are pools so that everyone contributing work gets a share of the profit. There are no pools in Chia. You're farming a digital lottery ticket that then sits there using up hard drive space and an always on PC hoping one off your tickets wins.
I researched it a bit so I'd understand the basics and the cost to earnings setup. It's so wasteful of hardware and space that I didn't want to set up a rig, though.