Goodbye mining, hello farming
The impact of chia is already being felt.
Just when you thought the cryptocurrency-induced PC component shortages couldn’t get any worse, there’s a new coin in town: chia. There’s now a looming prospect of a cryptocoin that does to storage what ethereum has done to the graphics card market.
Chia coin officially went live on March 19, but the coin didn’t start publicly trading on crypto exchanges until May 3. From a slow burn for the first few weeks, the amount of storage space required for the network (called netspace) ballooned from around 214PB to over 3.6EB – that’s exabytes, or 3,984,588.8 terabytes. I shudder to think about how much netspace will be allocated to chia by the time you read this, given the current rate of increase.
But let’s talk about what makes chia different. One of the big concerns with bitcoin, ethereum, dogecoin, and many other crypto coins is that they rely on proof of work. It’s a race to solve a mathematical function that scales in difficulty. Bitcoin uses an estimated 13GW of power, or 14TWh per year – about as much as the Netherlands.
Chia, in contrast, uses proof of time and space, which should dramatically cut down on the amount of power consumed. On the other hand, it will chew up as much storage space as people are willing to throw at it, with a current default plot size of 108.9GB. Using 10TB hard drives, it would require about 360,000 drives for the current netspace. Assuming 5W of idle power use (the drives would mostly be idle), that’s still 1.8MW of power, so bitcoin currently uses over 7,000 times as much energy. But if the netspace reaches 30EB or even 300EB, suddenly chia stops looking so green.
The proof of space element should slow down the rate of scaling. Where all that’s required to bring a new GPU or ASIC online with proof of work hashing is powering the device up to start “mining,” chia refers to its proof of space as “farming.” Chia farmers have to generate plots that get filled up with what amounts to a complex bingo card. This takes a fast PC using a fast SSD about four hours for a single plot, but with the right hardware, it’s possible to do a dozen plots concurrently in about eight hours. That means even if a big mining corporation wants to hop on the chia bandwagon and buys a few petabytes of storage, filling those drives up with chia plots could take several weeks.
Maybe it will end up as another flash-in-the-pan cryptocurrency. That’s perhaps the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario has started to play out in China, where SSD and HDD shortages are already happening. One SSD manufacturer attributes a 500 percent increase in sales in April to the demand from chia farmers, for example, and people online have reported seeing 400 percent increases in large HDD prices virtually overnight.
That will impact people who aren’t trying to farm chia as well, and with SSD controller shortages prior to chia, we could see another perfect storm hit the PC industry.
“I shudder to think about how much netspace will be allocated to chia by the time you read this”