Chia "farming" craze causes hard drive shortage

Chia, an environmentally friendly alternative to Bitcoin created by BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen, has triggered a shortage of hard drives. According to Hong Kong technology publication HKEPC, because Chia is about to be opened for trading, miners are scrambling to stock up on hard drives to "farm", and hard drive prices in some areas have more than doubled.

Chia was registered in August 2017 with the goal of developing a platform that optimizes blockchain and smart transactions. The Chia Network is currently being established to improve global financial and payment systems. Chia will be the first enterprise-level digital currency. Unlike most cryptocurrencies that use computing power for mining, Chia uses idle disk space on the hard drive to run proof of space (Pospace) and coordinates with another consensus algorithm, proof of time (Potime) to verify the blockchain. The income of Chia "farmers" (miners) from "farming" (mining) is proportional to the amount of resources, that is, storage space. If you have 10 times the hard drive space, you will get 10 times the reward.

Chia's mainnet was launched last month. The Chia team officially claimed that the POW consensus caused the hoarding of graphics cards, a huge waste of CPU, GPU and electricity resources, and the emergence of mining pool tyrants, which violated Satoshi Nakamoto's original intention of decentralization. The project aims to make home/individual mining popular again while avoiding multiple problems of Bitcoin and Ethereum. It does not use the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus protocol, but uses "proof of space", that is, storage capacity. The form of mining is jokingly called "farming" and miners are called "farmers".

In response to demand from Chia miners, domestic storage device manufacturer Jiahe Jinwei announced on Saturday that it will begin manufacturing dedicated cryptocurrency mining solid-state drives. The announcement also stated that its supply of large-capacity storage devices has been sold out.

The project is taking an unusual route. Its native token, XCH, has no cap, prefers predictable, ongoing inflation as an alternative solution, and the company disclosed in its recent business white paper that the founding team pre-mined 21 million XCH. Although the project aims to be more purely decentralized, Chia is not pursuing decentralization as a company. Instead, it is about to go public. Its team plans to submit an application for listing within 6-12 months.