A conversation with the 1PB miner Chia
You may already be aware that now in Russia the prices for large-volume hard drives and SSDs are growing rapidly, and people rush to computer stores, in a hurry buying components for new computers. The reason for this hype is the new Chia cryptocurrency, which requires large HDDs and wear-resistant SSDs to mine.
Chia offers a green mining model that doesn’t require colossal energy costs and reduce greenhouse emissions, as a large number of power plants still run on fossil fuels.
For a better understanding of everything related to this cryptocurrency, here is a transcript of my conversation with the Chia miner, which took place on the evening of April 21, 2021. I act as an SSD seller, and the miner acts as a repeat buyer, who comes-out during the conversation.
Disclaimer of any responsibility of the author and Revds. for all decisions made by you in relation to cryptocurrencies and mining
Author and Revds.:
are not the organizers / developers of Chia
have no opinion about the future fate and value of this cryptocurrency
may not share the miner’s position in the conversation below for any of his statements
Tips for thinking about investing and mining:
spend money you don’t mind throwing away
chances of getting rich are unknown
NEVER invest with borrowed funds
NEVER sell the latest apartments / cars / pants for gaming with cryptocurrencies
DO NOT TAKE “loan” savings from an old mother, with persuasion – “I will give you twice as much later.”
Some of the cryptocurrency projects are created by scammers
Miner: Good afternoon, please tell me, do you still have an Intel P3700 1.6TB SSD?
C: Yes, 1 left.
Miner: Wow! I understand they are hype now.
C: And then she is U.2.
Miner: Yes, I get it. By the way, they showed themselves well. I also took Intel P3605 1.6TB, which stick directly into PCI-E, but the U.2 Intel P3700 is more productive.
C: What do you want to buy? There are also several PCI-E drives.
Miner: I have nowhere to stick them. I took 2 pieces of P3605 from you, 1 piece of P3700, and one HGST SN260 for 7.68TB, and also bought a couple of new ones elsewhere. I will think, decide and take what I decide.
C: You can also use HYIP. Sell what you bought and buy yourself a higher capacity.
Miner: I don’t need to sell, I use them to mine Chia. I just moved into the topic a little earlier than people, since November 2020. And I take it for plotting. The plotting is powerful.
HGST SN260 – he is, of course, the coolest, by far. Only it was necessary to take the 6.4TB version, it has a larger resource, 3 DWPD. And then I have already spent 50% (7PB) of the resource. Intel PЗ605 – hold up well, and U.2 P3700 is generally handsome.
C: By the way, I learned special commands with which you can format the HGST SN260 7.68TB into a capacity of 4.48TB, and the resource will be 7.5 DWPD (61.3PB), 4.3 times more.
Miner: Willing to pay for this information.
S: No need. I will send you to the chat. Please answer the question: why is Chia plotting so fast?
Miner: The point is that all calculations are performed in a temporary file. It makes a temp file 0.29 TB in size. On the device that is plotting. I have two Ryzen 3950X and Threadripper 3970. And they write a lot on SSD. I think that Intel P3605 will not survive the year, despite the resource in 14PB.
Best of all (in terms of resource) in plotting are SATA S3710 at 800GB and U.2 P3700 1.6TB. The latter I put in the lead, resource 43.8PB.
And the U.2 P3700 is also very good in speed.
This is what I want to say. I have been in cryptocurrency for a long time. We are now dealing with one of the most hype projects in history after cue ball and broadcast.
The growth rate of the network is colossal, incredible, this has never happened. None of the 5000 cryptocurrencies I know. Daily increase in network capacity – 7%.
Most recently it was 470PB. Apparently, some large node fell off.
The network complexity has grown 3 times less than in a month. This is a phenomenal case, this has not happened in practice. Ether grew more slowly, the cue ball grew much slower. Well, this, of course, he was the first, no one yet knew what a crypt is.
I am currently mining Chia. She’s not moving yet, spot coins. There are concepts in cryptocurrency: spot and deliverable futures. The latter is essentially a commitment. Since yesterday, Chia has been listed on two exchanges.
Exchanges, of course, are not so hot for themselves: one Korean and another on the east. Chia came out at a very interesting cost. On Habit, a South Korean exchange, the candlestick was $ 5,000 yesterday. Then it dropped, of course, to $ 2,000. This is futures.
The spot will be able to move in 2-3 weeks. The Hot Spot is essentially the coin itself. It is on wallets and everyone is waiting for the opportunity to move it between wallets. The price will certainly drop. It will be dropped. I think that it will not go below $ 100. And then from $ 500 it will rise higher. These are my predictions.
C: I’m wondering if 1 core in plotting mode is able to load the entire SSD, or is multicore very important?
Miner: Here, for example, my configuration is Ryzen 3950x (16 cores, 32 threads), HGST SN260 7.68TB, u.2 Intel P3700 and Seagate HDD hard drives. The formation of 1 raft, which participates in mining, filters the network and confirms blocks / transactions, requires 1 stream.
If the memory is good. The memory is needed ECC, with error correction, as it is sharpened to work 24×7. With normal memory, I had glitches, crashes, no luck.
The percentage is needed 4.2-4.6GHz and above, it is desirable. Intel has 5GHz. But Intel’s in aggregate are significantly inferior to Ryzen at the moment. Even the Gen 11 generation, the 10980XE processors outperform Ryzen. And Threadripper is bringing Intel to its knees.