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Although the massive price hikes and rampant shortages for graphics cards have been stealing

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the headlines lately, you might have noticed that hard drives and SSDs are getting more expensive

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and harder to find as well. And unlike graphics cards, these aren't luxury items. I mean,

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you need them to operate your computer. So what the heck's going on? It turns out that the main

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reason is separate from the worldwide chip shortage. It's actually due to a new cryptocurrency

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called Chia. Not to be confused with those grassy pets that you can sit on your desk.

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But hold on a second. Why would you need more storage for crypto? Isn't that mostly based

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around graphics cards or asics? So here's the thing. Many well-known cryptocurrencies are

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mined with what's called a proof-of-work scheme, where you get rewarded with crypto for working

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on a problem. That is, using some of your processor resources to crunch numbers, basically. Chia,

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by contrast, is built on proof-of-space. Instead of getting coins for showing you

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dedicated processor time, you get Chia by allocating storage space on your machine

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exclusively for storing the cryptographic numbers used by its blockchain. Here's how it works.

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First, the Chia client will create large groups of cryptographic hashes on your drive called plots.

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This is a time-consuming process that benefits from having an SSD rather than a mechanical hard

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drive since plotting is so right-intensive. A good NVMe SSD can create a 100 GB plot,

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the recommended size, in as little as six or so hours, but a hard drive spinning around might

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only be able to do one a day or one every several days if you've got it connected to a bare-bone

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system like a raspberry pi. After a plot is completed, it's stored somewhere on your system

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long-term, typically on a hard drive, making a smaller NVMe SSD and one or more multi-terabyte

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hard drives a popular setup for Chia farming, which is the term the Chia community uses in

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place of mining. The way you get paid is that the Chia network scans the computer's link to it for

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a plot that matches a certain hash. And if that plot is one of yours, then congratulations,

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you're paid out some Chia as a reward. Though right now, with the size of the Chia net space

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surging, it's become less and less likely for home farmers to win Chia. However, with Chia pools

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rolling out in the very near future, they might even be live by the time you watch this, a user

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with 10 or 20 terabytes of space might be able to bring in a decent amount of money, though of

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course it would be divided among other pool members. But if you do want to take the plunge and

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start farming Chia, what do you need besides lots of storage? Well, if you're plotting yourself,

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a baseline rule is at least one CPU thread, preferably two, and four gigs of memory per plot

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you're creating at once. So a popular configuration is 32 gigs of RAM and at least a six core

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12 threads CPU. Combine that with storage costs and serious Chia farming can be an expensive

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proposition. But it is possible to buy plots that have already been created from third parties and

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just download them instead. In which case, you can forego having all those threads and RAM and

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you really only need just a ton of hard drive space. How about the environmental impact? Even

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though Chia was conceived as a greener alternative to traditional crypto mining, as storage devices

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use less energy than GPUs, it's already come under fire for putting additional strain on storage

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supply chains, not to mention that Chia plotting can destroy consumer grade SSDs fairly quickly.

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It's recommended to instead use a high endurance or even enterprise SSD to avoid this, but regardless,

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proof of space cryptos will still cause people to buy SSDs more frequently, at least in the short

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term. Hmm, maybe it's time to look into finally coughing up that 10 bucks a month Google wants

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for cloud storage. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,

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and be sure to hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions for videos that we should

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cover in the future.