2021-05-06 19:17:06
At the end of April, miners in China and Japan began to massively buy hard drives and SSDs with a capacity of 8 TB and above, which led to a local shortage of drives
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The reason was the launch of Chia, a cryptocurrency from the author of the BitTorrent. Unlike bitcoin, ethereum and other well-known cryptocurrencies, Chia mining requires physical storage space, not processing power.
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The new cryptocurrency uses a proof-of-space-time approach.
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Any Chia transfer between network participants is a cryptographic function, like in Bitcoin, but its result doesn't need to be calculated, but found in ready-made tables
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If someone from the participants found the desired result in their tables, the Chia translation is considered “proven”. Further, transfers are added in blocks to the blockchain, and the participants who found them receive a certain amount of ChiaCoin as a reward.
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This process is called Chia farming, similar to Bitcoin mining.
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But instead of powerful computing resources, it requires free space on hard drives or SSDs to store tables of ready values. The more of these tables a network member has, the higher the chances that they will contain "proof" of the next translation
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First, the drives need to be filled with such tables, and this is already a computational process called plotting (seeding). But Chia plotting is not as difficult as mining other cryptocurrencies, because it does not calculate a specific value, but generates many random values.
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ChiaCoin's algorithms are specially designed so that the increase in computing power does not give an advantage in farming. This is part of the proof-of-time mechanism that Chia uses.
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Chia problems:
The growing interest in Chia farming is likely to lead to a shortage of high-volume drives. This inevitably follows from the principle of the new cryptocurrency.
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ChiaCoin is not the first cryptocurrency to be generated on hard drives and SSDs instead of processors and video cards. The first was Burstcoin, released back in 2014.
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Moreover, it was the first to implement smart contracts, which later became a "feature" of Ethereum. Burstcoin also promised to become the first "green" cryptocurrency, as Chia now.
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Despite all these unique features, Burstcoin is now worth around two cents and has a market cap of just over $ 32 million
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Bitcoin has firmly occupied a niche and is not going to leave
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Author Chia wants replace Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and other cryptocurrencies that use a proof-of-work approach.
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Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency in history, it is in great demand and authority, and large financiers speak positively about it. The Ethereum blockchain has its own advantages, which is why even traditional payment systems like VISA agree to work with it.
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Most likely, Chia will not exist instead of cryptocurrencies, but together with them. This means that cryptocurrencies will begin to consume a huge amount of not only energy, but also disk space. Its consumption is already growing daily.
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The current value of one ChiaCoin is over $1,000. The indicator is considerable, but some conclusions can be drawn only a few years after the full launch. What do you think about the prospects for ChiaCoin?
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