Chia pre-mined 6 years worth of block rewards. Proof-of-space may be the closest thing we have to a viable proof-of-work replacement but this instantiation of it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders.<p>Edit: My calculation was based on the initial reward schedule of 64 units per block, but when you take into account the fact that it ramps down to 4 units per block shortly thereafter, it's actually a premine of 21 years: <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/5-takeaways-from-chia-networks-new-white-paper" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/5-takeaways-from-chia-networks-new-...</a>
chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing is shifting opex (electricity consumption) to capex (hardware costs). We can see this in bitcoin mining hardware. They've gotten exponentially more efficient over the years, but electricity consumption hasn't gone down. Having lower opex only incentivizes miners to pour more money into hardware, which results in resources poured into manufacturing rather than providing electricity.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.chia.net/faq/" rel="nofollow">https://www.chia.net/faq/</a>
Here I am thinking there's finally a working file storage coin for truly decentralized and anonymous file hosting and no... it's another proof-of-waste thing.
One interesting thing about chia is that before you can “farm” you have to “plot”. Plotting (generating the files that fill up the hard drive to provide the proof of stake) takes fast SSDs and lots of CPU, if you want to build your farm in any reasonable timeframe.<p>The challenge is that it requires you to buy different sets of hardware to earn chia, and the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily (while you’re filling up hard drives). It seems a cottage industry of plotting services is already developing so that those that want to farm don’t have to invest in the hardware to plot.<p>Farming requires very little CPU and slow disks are not a problem.
Right now the focus is on network growth and farming, but I think long-term the smart contracts capability of Chia will be most interesting:<p><a href="https://chialisp.com" rel="nofollow">https://chialisp.com</a><p>Basically the authors saw how much Ethereum/Solidity contracts are hacked because of unintended stateful side effects and decided to make a purely functional LISP-based language where there are none.
I'm admittedly rather disappointed with Chia after reading up on it, as I thought it was closer to Sia [0] or Storj [1] where you got rewarded in coin to provide storage space, but instead it's more akin to Burstcoin [2] and indeed, proof-of-capacity cryptocurrencies are nothing new and the only supposedly added value would be on Chialisp for (safer?) smart contracts. It IS factually correct to say proof-of-capacity is far less resource intensive than proof-of-work crypto as even the least efficient hard drive will consume orders of magnitude less energy than a mining rig, but it's still based on tying up a resource, this time it's just a majority of hardware and a minority of electricity instead of the other way around.<p>One issue that most people advocating for proof-of-stake gleefully ignore is to work through the initial distribution of the coin- can't stake what you don't have. So you either have a sizable premine, you bootstrap your coin using someone else's ledger or you start out with proof-of-work (or like Chia, proof-of-capacity) and then move on to proof-of-stake once there's a stable ecosystem for it. It does seem like Chia comes with a sizable premine, which is also disappointing but not entirely surprising as practically every new cryptocurrency that has come out as of late has had it to "financially bootstrap" its development and what not. I'd also have some choice words about Bram Cohen, but they'd be rather out of scope here.<p>[0] <a href="https://sia.tech/" rel="nofollow">https://sia.tech/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.storj.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.storj.io/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.burst-coin.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.burst-coin.org/</a>
In regular file storage, data error rates must be very low.<p>In Chia, fairly high error rates are still very profitable.<p>Current hard disks might see one uncorrectable error every 1,000 TB read from them. Chia would be fine with one error every 1 megabyte.<p>That difference might allow custom drive firmwares to put far more bits far closer together, leading to cheaper less reliable storage for farming.
Disks are about $20/TB right now.<p>So 1 exabyte is $20M. Well within the scope of VC funding for someone who wants to make Chia appear to be a success.
I don’t get it - it’s promoted as environmentally friendly, but it doesn’t seem that 1EB is being used for any actual useful storage purpose. It’s locked up as part of the running of the Chia system isn’t it?
Google, Facebook, and all the other datahoarders are going to be pissed that there is now a new and distributed player eating away their share from the global HDD and SSD market.
I've had trouble finding an answer to one question: I don't understand why one would need multiple drives. Seems like you could earn the coin, sell it for USD, erase the drive, and earn another coin with the same disk.<p>What prevents this?
I'm not very happy with this. In the space of a week the price on that 10tb hard disk I've had my eye on for a while has increased by £70. No choice but to swallow it though as prices will rise even more.
The network has grown so rapidly recently that there is no hope of getting reward unless you have a purpose built farming rig, and that’s really devastating to the block chains longevity. The most compelling part about this crypto to me is that it could be farmed by anyone with their extra HDD/SSD space, but if there is no reward for the performance hit then the coin is much less interesting to the general public, who you need most for long-term acceptance of Chia.
What is going on with Chia? Over the last week I've been getting news stories about Chia miners buying up hard drives and driving up prices. But I haven't really seen prices going up. And I looked into Chia and it seems like it is just running a testnet right now. And my coworker has not been getting the same news stories about hard drive prices.
Monero supposedly had no premine. There are over 10,000 different crypto currencies and I know first hand several did not have a premine.<p>6 YEARS PRE-MINE AND CALLING IT "PRE-FARM" IS AN INSULT<p>I generally don't have a problem with pre-mines and actively participate in coins with premines.<p>BUT 6 YEARS!?!?! GET REAL DUDES
So how many resources are needed now to mine just one proper bitcoin? First it could be done with a regular pc. Now you need advanced videocards, hardware, more power and loads of diskspace. So how much do you have to spend before mining one coin?
I hate this crypto thing too. more spiking people's belief to milk frivolous unfounded overconsumption. hard drive prices have doubled & that's if you can find stock. all for some new unproven technoreligion that promises riches. that is frankly equally as inscrutable & impersonal as all the other concensensus driven scarcizitation ponzi schemes. computing is far too good to be wasted on concensensus, on the limited. and such harping upon fomo, such impervious immovable centralized concensus at the heart of each of these, depraved & mad preying upon people, praying to get rich by helping stupid clocks to keep ticking; this poor sad era.