Although the massive price hikes and rampant shortages for graphics cards have been stealing
the headlines lately, you might have noticed that hard drives and SSDs are getting more expensive
and harder to find as well. And unlike graphics cards, these aren't luxury items. I mean,
you need them to operate your computer. So what the heck's going on? It turns out that the main
reason is separate from the worldwide chip shortage. It's actually due to a new cryptocurrency
called Chia. Not to be confused with those grassy pets that you can sit on your desk.
But hold on a second. Why would you need more storage for crypto? Isn't that mostly based
around graphics cards or asics? So here's the thing. Many well-known cryptocurrencies are
mined with what's called a proof-of-work scheme, where you get rewarded with crypto for working
on a problem. That is, using some of your processor resources to crunch numbers, basically. Chia,
by contrast, is built on proof-of-space. Instead of getting coins for showing you
dedicated processor time, you get Chia by allocating storage space on your machine
exclusively for storing the cryptographic numbers used by its blockchain. Here's how it works.
First, the Chia client will create large groups of cryptographic hashes on your drive called plots.
This is a time-consuming process that benefits from having an SSD rather than a mechanical hard
drive since plotting is so right-intensive. A good NVMe SSD can create a 100 GB plot,
the recommended size, in as little as six or so hours, but a hard drive spinning around might
only be able to do one a day or one every several days if you've got it connected to a bare-bone
system like a raspberry pi. After a plot is completed, it's stored somewhere on your system
long-term, typically on a hard drive, making a smaller NVMe SSD and one or more multi-terabyte
hard drives a popular setup for Chia farming, which is the term the Chia community uses in
place of mining. The way you get paid is that the Chia network scans the computer's link to it for
a plot that matches a certain hash. And if that plot is one of yours, then congratulations,
you're paid out some Chia as a reward. Though right now, with the size of the Chia net space
surging, it's become less and less likely for home farmers to win Chia. However, with Chia pools
rolling out in the very near future, they might even be live by the time you watch this, a user
with 10 or 20 terabytes of space might be able to bring in a decent amount of money, though of
course it would be divided among other pool members. But if you do want to take the plunge and
start farming Chia, what do you need besides lots of storage? Well, if you're plotting yourself,
a baseline rule is at least one CPU thread, preferably two, and four gigs of memory per plot
you're creating at once. So a popular configuration is 32 gigs of RAM and at least a six core
12 threads CPU. Combine that with storage costs and serious Chia farming can be an expensive
proposition. But it is possible to buy plots that have already been created from third parties and
just download them instead. In which case, you can forego having all those threads and RAM and
you really only need just a ton of hard drive space. How about the environmental impact? Even
though Chia was conceived as a greener alternative to traditional crypto mining, as storage devices
use less energy than GPUs, it's already come under fire for putting additional strain on storage
supply chains, not to mention that Chia plotting can destroy consumer grade SSDs fairly quickly.
It's recommended to instead use a high endurance or even enterprise SSD to avoid this, but regardless,
proof of space cryptos will still cause people to buy SSDs more frequently, at least in the short
term. Hmm, maybe it's time to look into finally coughing up that 10 bucks a month Google wants
for cloud storage. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,
and be sure to hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions for videos that we should
cover in the future.