A recent podcast speculated quite bit about the economics of Chia Network’s new proof of space and time consensus algorithm.
Let’s discuss the assertion that there are optimizations in storage technology leave the creation of specialised Chia farming hardware that costs an order of magnitude but commodity disks.
Even if it were possible to form such advantaged specialized hardware, it might likely be unprofitable to get storage solely for the aim of farming. There’s $140 billion in storage capacity sold per annum and an outsized fraction of that’s unused and may easily be made to farm for Chia. Because Chia farming rewards are going to be much but the cost of that storage, work difficulty adjustment will make the reward per byte per day be substantially but the amortized price of latest storage. But albeit all Chia farming hardware were purchased specifically for that use we believe the margin between specialized and unspecialized hardware are going to be within an element of two , and can explain why below.
Higher layer functionality of the filing system like inodes and indexing are a layer above the underlying hardware. It’s possible with all storage media to urge access to a raw partition but applications rarely do this because modern mass storage is so unbelievably huge that the overhead added by such functionality doesn’t make a cloth impact on performance.
Optimizing storage technology for bulk storage applications, Chia farming included, is dominated by price per terabyte. Any technology which could do better than commodity hard drives would be dominating already. Any new innovation which does better will successfully take over the entire storage market, not just Chia farming.
The amount of your time for the network to farm subsequent block are going to be a minimum of one minute and can average five minutes. The speed of finding a symbol of space doesn’t matter as long as it’s but a moment , but rapidly makes farming not worth doing if it takes far more than a moment . Even the ‘glacial’ lookup and ‘slow’ read times on hard drives are still way better than what’s necessary to remain under a moment . The primary attacks on proofs of space are algorithmic ones which use extra computational resources to urge more rewards out of a hard and fast amount of space. Resisting those kinds of attacks may be a major development focus for us and therefore the subject of our Asiacrypt paper which we’ve since made further improvements upon. We’re also getting to have a best implementation competition with real cash rewards within the future after we’ve published a specification. We feel confident that such efforts will quickly end in a plateau of rewards for a modest amount of computation which any better trade-offs would require an infeasible cost prohibitive amount of computational resources. If you are new then check chia plot online and check FAQ’s there too.