The new digital currency Chia consumes a lot of hard drives. Photo: Guardian The Guardian (UK) reported that American businessman Bram Cohen created a digital currency called Chia. Accordingly, Chia aims to be more advanced than Bitcoin and Ethereum in reducing the energy consumed to mine. Cryptocurrency mining often depends on high power consuming computers to handle complex algorithms. However, Chia requires the user to spend a large amount of control to form and store any number of numbers. Given the fact that the price of cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed in recent times, the demand for hard drives specifically for Chia mining has also skyrocketed. A type of semiconductor drive (SSD) called NVMe, which is used to generate random numbers, is also highly sought after. Over the past week, the prices of hard drives and NVMe have been on an uphill trend. One point worth noting is that SSDs are inherently limited in number. Digital currency expert David Gerard told the Guardian: “Instead of consuming power, Chia gobbles up SSDs at a special rate.” According to CoinMarketCap on May 26, in the last 24 hours, there was 50 million USD worth of Chia traded, quite modest compared to 50 billion USD of Bitcoin. However, Chia’s potential keeps the demand for hard drives still on the rise. In the past, graphics cards, which have been an important element of video games and artificial intelligence research, have also fallen into sharp shortages due to demand from Ethereum miners. In another development, on May 26, Iran issued a ban on Bitcoin mining to prevent power shortages.

According to Mr. Cong, during more than 2 months of mining Chia, the actual amount of copper received back only stopped at 3 units. Currently, on the Huobi exchange, Chia is being valued at $820. This means that after 2 months and 3 billion of capital, he earned about 56 million VND. Fear of missing out on green Bitcoin The reason given by Mr. Cong is that although Chia saves electricity, it is difficult to compete with the super mines in China. Besides, the dramatic drop in the price of cryptocurrencies in the past week also increased the payback time of Chia mines. The hard drive is what determines the success or failure of Chia mining. “I invest a lot of money but I am quite vague about my income. The reason is that I fear that I will miss the opportunity to get rich like the way Bitcoin created 4 years ago. There were very few Bitcoin miners back then, I was one of the first. That’s why I have faith in Chia. But things don’t seem to be as I thought,” Cong said. According to Mr. Cong, his Chia mining system uses a 6TB HDD. Each of these hard drives costs 6.5 million VND. The number of hard drives in Mr. Cong’s mine is close to 300. Previously, the price of HDDs was only about 2-4 million VND. However, the wave of Chia mining has made the hard drive double in price. To cope with the huge write rates of Chia miners, many memory manufacturers have designed SSDs specifically for this purpose, like TeamGroup’s T-Create Expert model with a write limit of up to 12,000 TB. Amazon Web Services also recently opened a Chia mining service for the Chinese market. Hard drives increase in price, are in short supply but still have to buy more “In the game of chia mining, whoever has the most large capacity hard drives, that person has a higher chance of winning. And the winners at this point are the mining pools in China. They buy large quantities of hard drives at very high prices to gain an advantage in the market,” said Mr. Reply Zing , a representative of GearVN store confirmed the shortage of goods with large capacity drive models. However, this company’s customers, mainly individual users, have not been affected much. Hard drive prices have doubled since April because of the green Bitcoin craze. “GearVN’s customers are mainly end users and gamers, with a demand for hard drive capacity from 1 TB to 4 TB. In this segment, the price and supply are still stable,” a GearVN representative shared. This is also considered the biggest risk when participating in the “Green Bitcoin” market. According to experts, the difficulty of Chia mining is many times faster than Bitcoin. This means that mining systems must be invested with as many hard drives as possible. Previously, Bitcoin could be mined at individual scale because of the slow increase in difficulty. In the Chinese market, many traders have gathered thousands of hard drives to redistribute to Chia miners. According to ADATA, thanks to Chia, the number of SSDs sold by this company has increased 5 times in the past month. The shortage of goods makes many manufacturers of hard drives and SSDs prioritize serving the Chinese market. Order time in other markets is 2, 3 times longer. “In the past, every time a new order was placed, the waiting time was about 4-6 weeks. Now, the waiting time must increase to 8-10 weeks, high-capacity lines can sometimes be up to 13-15 weeks. Calculated, the standby time increased 2, 3 times, “said a representative of a distributor of the Seagate hard drive brand. Despite having an advantage in power consumption, Chia has a problem with mining materials, here is the hard drive. “I have to constantly buy hard drives while the price is getting more and more expensive. Without a hard drive, we wouldn’t have a place to store the strings of codes that can form a Chia,” said Cong. Uncertain future Chia was created by Bram Cohen, the “father” of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file transfer protocol. The company behind this currency is Chia Network, backed by investor Naval Ravikant, some well-known companies such as Andreessen Horowitz or Cypherpunk Holdings. From May 3, this currency will be publicly traded and exchanged. According to the Business Insider , Split based on PoST (proof of space and time) consensus algorithm. In it, PoS (proof of space) describes an allocated hard drive space for blockchain block storage. In other words, the “miner” Chia will reserve a certain amount of memory space on the hard drive to store blockchains. Mining is very little, but participants have to constantly buy more hard drives in order to have space to store the blockchain. They will be awarded based on the ratio of memory cells that “miners” have to store compared to the entire network, as verified by a VDF server (aka Timelord). Chia Network, the representative company, said that this currency has good security, consumes less energy than coins using the PoW (proof of work) consensus algorithm. Unlike Bitcoin, Chia has no limit on the amount of coins mined on the blockchain. Instead, the number of diggers that can be mined will change continuously depending on demand. Chia Network, the company responsible for this currency will hold 21 million Chia in order to control price fluctuations, reducing the possibility of problems. Although the future of Chia is envisioned as ideal, the coin has only been traded on a number of crypto exchanges since early May with the token XCH. At first, the price per dong has more than doubled from $700 on May 4 to $1,600. However, facing the decline of the entire cryptocurrency market, Chia also suffered a price drop. Besides, too much hard drive also makes the Chia project away from the original “green” purpose of the founders. The owner of the net shop unplugs the machine, digs coins and waits for the translation to end Due to the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic, Mr. Nguyen Minh Quan (Thu Duc City) had to close the net shop, remove the graphics card to dig coins, earn extra income waiting for the reopening of the shop.