Re:Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
by Glench on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @11:42PM
(#26977198)
As you can see in the graph, the mainnet network space for the Chia blockchain is growing exponentially fast. Lots of people starting to mine ("farm") Chia using low-electricity proofs of space. The full node count over the trailing 5 days is north of 120,000 which is more than Bitcoin I believe.
Part of the reason for this is because Chia is really easy to farm — anyone with extra space on their hard drives can do it. There are people farming a petabyte with a Raspberry Pi. This was by design to keep the network decentralized and hard to attack — close to the original intention of "one cpu one vote" from bitcoin.
Right now there's no price for Chia since it's not on exchanges and transactions won't start until May 3. But in the short term it's advantageous to buy enterprise-level SSDs because they're the fastest to "plot" with so it seems that in a few markets, especially in China where interest in farming Chia is surging, a few SSD sellers have seen a spike in demand.
For long-term effects on the storage industry it's hard to say what will happen — there's tons of existing storage out in the world already, the storage industry already sells 1+ zettabytes of storage a year, and unlike single-use bitcoin mining hardware hard drives are useful outside of Chia. The Chia company speculates on the impact on the storage industry on page 23 of their business whitepaper: https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...
Part of the reason for this is because Chia is really easy to farm — anyone with extra space on their hard drives can do it. There are people farming a petabyte with a Raspberry Pi. This was by design to keep the network decentralized and hard to attack — close to the original intention of "one cpu one vote" from bitcoin.
Right now there's no price for Chia since it's not on exchanges and transactions won't start until May 3. But in the short term it's advantageous to buy enterprise-level SSDs because they're the fastest to "plot" with so it seems that in a few markets, especially in China where interest in farming Chia is surging, a few SSD sellers have seen a spike in demand.
For long-term effects on the storage industry it's hard to say what will happen — there's tons of existing storage out in the world already, the storage industry already sells 1+ zettabytes of storage a year, and unlike single-use bitcoin mining hardware hard drives are useful outside of Chia. The Chia company speculates on the impact on the storage industry on page 23 of their business whitepaper: https://www.chia.net/assets/Chia-Business-Whitepaper-2021-02...