Oh Come On! Mining On SSDs Now?!?

Source: Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN Oh Come On!  Mining On SSDs Now?!?

A Real Reason To Hate All Things Chia

Bram Cohen, who help develop a way for us all to share Linux distros and public domain movies, has done something horrific.  A team have created a new cryptocurrency that will mean a whole new component shortage will hit us as soon as it is released for mining.  Chia will not rely on the GPU you can’t buy but instead it benefits more from storage with incredibly high IOPS.  Yes, mining on SSDs is now a thing, so get ready for a run on them; at a time when the price of flash storage is already rising.

Yes, Chia will be the newest coin. and according to the website it will also be the “first enterprise-grade digital money”.  It reportedly uses a new Nakamoto consensus algorithm which they have called Proof of Space and Time; because why wouldn’t you?   Instead of chugging through algorithms on a GPU, you allocate huge swaths of your SSD to store cryptographic numbers.  When the Chia blockchain requires a new block it will search all of that space and the owner of the drive with the hash that is closest to the challenge wins!  This means that the more space you allocate and the faster it can be searched, the more likely you are to own that next piece of the blockchain.

Of course, Chia being a new type of cryptocurrency means an opportunity to make things even more ridiculous.  Those who participate in this network are not miners, they are farmers.  The huge tracts of space you allocate on your hard drive are now plots which are seeded with hashes generated by the network.  It looks like you will even be able to buy special drives from a company in China optimized for playing this horrific version of Farmville.

Doesn’t that make it so much nicer than mining and thus acceptable that your next SSD is likely to cost significantly more?

Developed by the founder of BitTorrent Bram Cohen, Chia sets itself apart from other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin by relying much more heavily on having a fast SSD than a high-powered graphics card.

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About The Author

Jeremy Hellstrom

Call it K7M.com, AMDMB.com, or PC Perspective, Jeremy has been hanging out and then working with the gang here for years. Apart from the front page you might find him on the BOINC Forums or possibly the Fraggin' Frogs if he has the time.

5 Comments

  1. Rob

    If cryptominers could mine using their (see alternate name for) donkey, they would.

    Reply
  2. Readthewhitepaper

    SSD is only useful to create the initial 100gb plots, they are then moved onto ordinary hdds for storage and farming / ‘mining’.
    The initial plot generated will last for 5-7years so once you have filled your large storage the SSD is no longer used. There is no benefit to hoarding SSDs as they do not improve the actualy ‘mining’ element other than initial plot generation, the bias would be toward lots of regular cheap storage with low power consumption.

    After the initial rush for SSDs to get people started, the longer term effect will be more demand for cheaper bulk storage, faster and more reliable SSDs (in terms of total read/writes before failure).

    Reply
  3. Tyler

    Missed the mark wildly on what it actually is. Farming speed is not required only storage size matters, HDD will perform just as well as SSD for this and most everyone will use HDD to do it because of $/tb. SSD can decrease the time it takes to create a plot itself but it’s also completely unnecessary, just saves you 10 to 20 percent of time but if you’re not making massive amounts you don’t need that. Any regular person can just use whatever computer they have plus whatever extra storage space they have and fill out with plots. Anyone using SSD for plotting large amounts will also stick to enterprise grade SSDs which means the consumer grade versions everyone wants for their home will be relatively unused.

    Reply
  4. psuedonymous

    This is FAR from the first blockchain system based on drive capacity allocation (‘Proof of space’). Most are angled towards utilising that aggregated occupied capacity as cloud storage, meaning that if said ‘coin’ were to not exist, that cloud capacity demand would instead be served by… the same drives at a dedicated file host service.

    Reply

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