Let's say your mining operation brings in $1000/day in revenue. If it's mining bitcoin you might be paying $500/day in electricity bills, leaving you with $500 as profit to reinvest in the business (ie. buy more hardware). If it's mining chia you might be paying $50/day in electricity. That's $450 in less resources wasted, sounds good right? Well no, because any savvy businesman is going to reinvest that $450 into buying more mining hardware, so you can make even more money. In the end any resource you save from lower electricity consumption just gets poured into manufacturing more hardware.
>And they can be used for other purposes besides just farming Chia
This is a mixed bag, because while it's true that the mining hardware can be repurposed, it also means that during boom times, regular consumers have to pay more for their hardware. See for instance, the GPU shortage.
You can also read more about the power consumption of Chia here: https://chiapower.org/
Chia does only one thing: replace $1000 spent on electricity with $1000 spent on SSD manufacturing. It’s unclear which one is worse for the environment, but I think it’s likely that SSD manufacturing is worse, given the (real) mining and toxic chemicals involved.
You can also use any old extra disk space you have on your current computers.
SSDs have limited program/erase lifespan, and the proof-of-space algorithms used by Chia eat into that lifespan pretty fast.
But from what I learned there, Chia is not a consumer’s tech, cause mainnet already requires huge TBW per dollar ratio, which ubiquitous Samsung EVO/Pro and alikes cannot do. It goes miners-are-special-hardware route again, sadly.
Has anyone tried this? Would be interesting to see the benefits.
It’s a matrix of processor cores, threads per core, temp drive bandwidth, memory, and temp drive speed. Oh and cost per TiB of plots per day.
Also plotting happens in several stages, and each has a different set of requirements. So timing the running of plots in parallel and staggering starts also comes into it.
Somewhere over that couple days I read that you can farm on an HD, but plotting is faster on an SSD, so I'm making a huge presumption that plotting on a ramdisk would be even faster, without the wear on an SSD.
I'm still not clear on Chia. Sometimes I think I understand it, and other times I'm not so sure...
Multipurpose mining hardware would compromise security of the network. An alternative use for the hardware would effectively be a subsidy on mining Bitcoin.
This would imply that the costs of securing Bitcoin are not being paid by Bitcoin hodlers, and are not fully internalised by Bitcoin.
This is similar to the reason that Proof of Work must not have economic uses external to the network.
If such a subsidy were more valuable than rewards intrinsic to the network, any variance in that subsidy would cause variance in the security of the network, with the likely case being reduced security, the network now being dependent on that external use case.
E.g. if the alternative use is valuable, it might incentivise me to acquire enough miners such that I control majority hashrate of the network subsidised by the alternative more profitable use of the hardware. Any attack on the network is then subsidised by the external use case for the hardware.
From where? Individuals or enterprises? With the direction we're headed (SSDs and cloud storage), it's hard to imagine many people with a few terabytes of hard drive space. On the other hand you can get around cheap hard drives at around $15/TB if you buy external, then shuck them so you can put it in a backpane or something. At that price, it's hard to beat the price of a new drive, especially if you factor in the time it takes for the individual to set it up. Enterprises might have better economies of scale, but I'm skeptical that executives would sign off on running arbitrary code on production servers just to earn some cryptocoins.
It also seems likely that flash storage will become cheaper than HDDs in the next ten years, which will start increasing SSD space on drives due to increased competition. Analysis here: https://wikibon.com/qlc-flash-hamrs-hdd/
Storage workloads aren't uniform. Some need to have localized, reliable, consistently performing persistent storage with room to absorb sudden demand spikes (like customer data on cloud clusters). Others can be stored anywhere and moved with ease, with few requirements on latency, redundancy on a global scale, and read-mostly workloads, which means immediate loss of a single local copy is harmless (like YouTube videos). FAANGs have long since figured this out and how to optimize their storage utilization.
There is zero chance one of them is going to up and decide that Chia is a better use of their "spare" (not really) storage capacity if they have anything resembling competent engineering teams. I know Google does.
Source: Xoogler.
While I don’t think too many businesses will buy this idea of using spare storage for “cryptofarming”, unused resources are pretty common.
The price of a cryptocurrency will tend to roughly follow the cost of generating it. In storage, it’s safe to assume the cost will only go down for the same amount of space. And disk space has been growing faster than transistor density for some time now.
So in the end this is going to be just like every other cryptocurrency: people largely deploying exclusive mining (sorry, "farming") capacity and consuming resources doing so.
At least some data centers destroy their old drives for privacy reasons, so they would need to figure out a way around that if they’re going to reuse them offsite.
AFAIK people already buy up used datacenter drives to use elsewhere, so you're just shifting demand around.
Bitcoin is a shitty public ledger, the resource consumption is due to the significant collective interest in it, not what it accomplishes.
[1] https://www.chia.net/faq/