Chia claims to be a more green solution. Even going as far as to call their white paper a "green paper." Not sure anyone told them that burning through hard drives isn't very green either.

[1] https://www.chia.net/greenpaper/

Yeah, all the electricity savings is just going to go towards buying (aka manufacturing) more hard drives.

Ethereum are the GPU's. Bitcoin utilizes ASIC's designed only for Bitcoin. This is an eventual e-waste issue, but not a GPU supply issue.

There was a period between about 2011 and 2014 when the fastest way to mine bitcoin was on a GPU and it did cause a shortage in cards:

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/12/11/amds-graph...

Ah yes, those days, I mined two bitcoins and sold them for $100, then got bored...

Nobody cares which coin of the week is used, it is time to get rid of the crypto garbage.

there is no "eventual E-Waste issue" .. there has been an E-Waste issue for 20+ years. Ridiculous amounts of fresh water, electricity, transport fuel and other non-renewables have been poured into the PC industry since most here were born. The damage that this does is proportional to a few things, like the source of the electricity and the containment of the material and "end of life" .. Consumer electronics have been living way past their means for decades, but in the age of COMDEX Las Vegas, as long as the quarterly results match, few in a decision-making role actually care.

Do bitcoin ASICs compete for the same limited IC foundry space?

Antminer S19 uses a 7nm process, so yes.

“Chia” means “shat” in French.

"Chia" also refers to the plant "Salvia hispanica", that's Nahuatl/Mexicano.

I'm from the U.S., and when I hear/read "Chia", I think of the Chia Pet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Pet

They are one and the same!

In French too [1]. «Chia» as “shat” is a theoretical conjugation of the slang word «chier» that you'll never meet in practice.

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_(plante)

As is the past form "shat" in English, for that matter.

Quite frankly, I'd rather eat shit.

You mean chier, the verb. Chia means chia

Well the simple past tense / 3rd person of "chier" is precisely "chia", spelled exactly like that. The herb/plant "chia" always sounds a bit weird to my ears because it makes me think of the verb tense... "Il chia" / "He shat". So GP is totally correct.

GP is maybe “technically” correct, but given that «chier» is a slang verb mostly used orally while passé simple is almost never used orally and never in casual context, which means that you'll never use that tense on this verb in practice. “He shat” will 99.99% of the time be translated to «il a chié» (passé composé).

Thanks. I’ve never in my life heard “il chia”. And you wouldn’t formally write something so informal.

Anyone curious can verify that google translate doesn’t even understand “il chia” and google translate is quite good on French.

It's precisely the juxtaposition of high grammar and low slang that makes it so humorous.

Someone cares enough to have compiled the conjugation: https://la-conjugaison.nouvelobs.com/du/verbe/chier.php

and it's a really old word, used frequently by Rabelais, for instance.

Do you mean "chié"? (shee-eh)

In that thread, they do the math on Chia's current effect, and it is tiny.

Not to say it won't grow to become a problem but even at 1EB of storage, it's not a problem:

> Data center storage growth is round 2-2.5 EB/day. The 1.4 EB used by Chia so far is less than one day's data center growth.

I'm not defending yet another wasteful use of cryptocurrency ... first it was the GPUs now its the SSDs.

Until we live in some horrid future where computers no longer have storage and we all use the cloud, consumers need to buy HDDs too. Not just data centers. This is a retail-level issue, not a data center growth issue. It's the same as how GPUs aren't on shelves because people use them to mine -- ASICs are better but the ASIC game is hard for retail "miners" to get into.

Uh, the last time I checked, Bitcoin mining typically uses ASICs. GPUs are not involved.

Last I checked, miners aren’t mining Bitcoin anymore. But miners are making the GPU shortage worse.

Miners are definitely still mining bitcoin.

You don't think this is exciting? I couldn't care less about what causes a surge in demand, but if there is substantial pressure on the HDD manufacturers to improve any of the following, consumers will only benefit:

* lower price points ($/GB);

* speed;

* size;

* availability / supply.

Of course, it will suck in the short term if HDDs become much harder to find, but that should only last as long as the manufacturers believe this to be a short term trend.