Is CHIA farming going to send hard drive prices soaring?

[wilfred]

I subscribe to a YT channel called "Dave's Garage". Today I watched a video where he set up a CHIA farming rig and apparently it uses hard drive storage space to create coins (or whatever they're called IDK). First I've ever heard of it. I hope he doesn't go nuts about it. I'll unsubscribe.

I'm not so interested in whether or not it is possible to make money from crypto of any kind, just if this is the sort of thing that will take off and lead to a massive surge of demand for hard drives and farms of machines with hundreds of attached hard drives.

Will this be more (or less) energy intensive way to generate coins? Or does the cost just shift to creating worn out hard drives?

A link to a clear analysis of it would be appreciated.

[AmnevaR]

Hi! I don't have a link to a clear analysis of it... but i do have a link to 3 year old video from LTT about mining Burstcoin

 

I think hard drive market will be okay 

[pardo-bsso]

Storage will be fine.

But think of all the switching power supplies with near perfect power factor that will be needed xD

(when I saw the title I almost thought of our beloved forum member)

[oPossum]

Seems to be quite popular.
These are out of stock everywhere.



Cha cha chia.

[NiHaoMike]

My experience with Burstcoin mining is that while it is indeed far more efficient than coins that are mined with GPUs, it gets similar efficiency to the coins mined with cheap smartphones but the initial cost per profit is much higher. Therefore, I just mined it with a HDD that I got on sale, making back about half the cost of that HDD before I used the space for other purposes.

Pretty much everyone has spare HDD capacity lying around and some intelligent software to use that for mining but immediately return it to the user when needed would be a good way to make use of it.

What I would like to see is a cryptocurrency mined by hosting content with low cost, low power computers like Raspberry Pi, with the goal of making an alternative to Youtube. Going a step further, a cryptocurrency that's mined by creating a P2P wireless mesh network would be even better although I don't have a clue how such a system could be made to work. (Maybe in the beginning, users could effectively get paid to share their Internet service with something like Tor, I2P, or VPN to avoid the usual problems with doing so, while other users could pay to access those wireless networks.)

[wilfred]

What I would like to see is a cryptocurrency mined by hosting content with low cost, low power computers like Raspberry Pi, with the goal of making an alternative to Youtube.

I you could get crypto from watching Youtube, I'd be doing pretty well. Wasn't that LBRY thing Dave kept banging on about
going to be a way to get crypto and compete with Youtube? I have to admit I paid little attention.

I also saw that video posted by LTT 3 years ago. nothing much since and now a flurry of videos on CHIA farming. But I don't get why anyone would bother if there is not yet a way to get the returns. From the video I watched it may never happen.

[ebastler]

Sheesh... What is the next resource you can ask people to waste in return for the opportunity to mine coins?

All aboard, come and mine my newly invented FuelCoin, where your proof of stake is the rate at which you drain gasoline into your bathroom sink! 

[Halcyon]

[NiHaoMike]

Sheesh... What is the next resource you can ask people to waste in return for the opportunity to mine coins?

Perhaps some resource that would be wasted anyways if not used? For example, you can't really save bandwidth at one time to use it another time, especially direct P2P bandwidth which has no artificial bandwidth billing. Any time the link is left idle is wasted bandwidth and the only savings is a negligible amount of power.

[Black Phoenix]

I subscribe to a YT channel called "Dave's Garage". Today I watched a video where he set up a CHIA farming rig and apparently it uses hard drive storage space to create coins (or whatever they're called IDK). First I've ever heard of it. I hope he doesn't go nuts about it. I'll unsubscribe.

I'm not so interested in whether or not it is possible to make money from crypto of any kind, just if this is the sort of thing that will take off and lead to a massive surge of demand for hard drives and farms of machines with hundreds of attached hard drives.

Will this be more (or less) energy intensive way to generate coins? Or does the cost just shift to creating worn out hard drives?

A link to a clear analysis of it would be appreciated.

Ohh yes, CHIA farming, the new crazy thing to make money. I remember seeing a video from LTT 3 years ago talking about crypto mining using HDD. And I will say that this craziness is currently running at full cylinders on the Electronic Supermarkets in Shenzhen.

I've been there today and there isn't a computer/server hardware assembly/repair boot without a demonstration server running Crypto mining using GPUs (and lot of empty boxes piled up of 3060/3070/3080 GPUs) and another server running CHIA (with boxes of OEM HDD piled up, the kind that have the inserts for 20 HDD). I counted more than 50 just in 2 floors.

I would love to see the same apparatus and demonstrations in blockchain but of diseases/vaccination research. Currently we didn't even have a global pandemic going on with mutations that don't even have a effective vaccine... /s

And yes, the prices of the HDD at least there increased by around 20% to 25% from 2 months ago.

[NiHaoMike]

I would love to see the same apparatus and demonstrations in blockchain but of diseases/vaccination research. Currently we didn't even have a global pandemic going on with mutations that don't even have a effective vaccine... /s

That's Curecoin and Foldingcoin. Initially designed with diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's disease in mind, it had expanded to also do research into understanding COVID-19.

[tszaboo]

OK, so I used this calculator to calculate with 32 TB of storage.
https://chiacalculator.com

So you spend 700 dollars on HDD and SSD, and you expect 70 dollars a month. That's 120% APR. But most "farmers" are giving up because, they apparently receive nothing, and big players are taking the cake. For a useless network, that does nothing. Ethereum mining ditto. And these APR is really really bad compared to other options, that dont require you to pollute the earth.

Or, there is Filecoin, where you provide space for deep storage. No idea about the ROI. But it is actually providing a real world use case, decentralized alternative to cloud storage, like AWS.
But, you know, money.

[NiHaoMike]

So you spend 700 dollars on HDD and SSD, and you expect 70 dollars a month. That's 120% APR. But most "farmers" are giving up because, they apparently receive nothing, and big players are taking the cake.

So basically a way for cloud storage providers to make profit from formerly unused storage. The overall effect on cloud storage remains to be seen, it will probably cause the really cheap options to disappear (makes no sense to rent out storage for less than the profit you can make using it for yourself), but it will also encourage providers to operate with more spare capacity since it would at the least be "subsidized".

Even now, the profit rate for CHIA compares poorly to Swagbucks. My Swagbucks miner based on the motherboard from a broken Nexus 7 makes $10-15/month at current difficulty (which strangely has more or less leveled off instead of constantly increasing as it did in the past), I'm sure it's not that difficult to find a new device for less than $100 that will mine Swagbucks well. But Swagbucks does not scale by design, they actually forked it to use a completely different hash algorithm after Scrypt ASICs started being able to run at the N factors that Swagbucks used. Then there's the pools and exchange services limiting how much can be mined per IP and what IP ranges are accepted.

[tszaboo]

3rd gen POS tokens are not mined, they are rewarded to token holders. Or if you do liquidity providing, the APR is much better on widely used DeFi exchanges. There is practically zero reason to keep Bitcoin or even Etherium network running, since new coins can do the same with something like 1/1000000 the resources and costs.

[aargee]

I think it's time for a huge Coronal Mass Ejection.