Chia miners jump overboard and they're selling everything

Several weeks ago a new cryptocurrency fever began to circulate on the network, especially one that had ecological promise, the cryptocurrency Chia, but that has been harshly criticized in recent months and its value has fallen dramatically in recent weeks as miners have started to abandon the cryptocurrency.

And is that during the last weeks several miners have started reselling their hardware, mostly refurbished SSD hard drives. They pass their used SSDs for new ones and they sell them, since Chia tends to destroy SSDs, it's only a matter of time before those "new" drives start to fail.

Chia is the basis of the bitcoin-type cryptocurrency chia coin. It is based on a linked blockchain of mathematical constructs based on the test of having disk space over a period of time.

It is said to be less demanding on the power supply than bitcoin, which is based on proof of work and requires large amounts of CPU processing. Chia's principle is simple: when a block is forged in the blockchain, it is propagated to the nodes of the network. When a miner finds one of the blocks, they publish it to the rest of the network and the others provide the best proof of space.

That is, the storage that they can make available to the network, the best three are transmitted to the network, and one of the "time servers" it contains confirms the time the test was provided and, therefore, validate the new block.

The idea is that everyone has free storage space that can be used to validate these transactions without generating additional consumption costs. Since Chia's launch, the new cryptocurrency has induced some changes in the hard drive market. According to research firm Context, it started out incredibly strong, leading to an overwhelming hard drive shortage.

In June, it was reported that just under 200.000 enterprise-grade nearline storage units with capacities of 10TB and above were sold to end users in Europe during April, representing a growth of 240% compared to the same month in 2020. .

At the same time, consumer-grade NAS hard drives sold about 250.000 drives, an increase of 167% year-on-year.

Using the test-of-space or test-of-capacity (PoC) technique it requires massive storage space, and Chia's trace can destroy modern SSDs in a matter of weeks.

According to a report from VNExpress, use an SSD to mine cryptocurrencies it is extremely taxing on the drive as in one example a 1TB SSD used to extract Chia only it would last about 80 days compared to 10 years of disk use in other cases.

Also, Chia's ecological motifs have been widely questioned lately, and Chia's piece is no longer considered such an ecological alternative. Since then, the cryptocurrency has fallen from a brief surge of $ 1,685 about three months ago to just $ 249.

In fact, after its launch in May, Chia reached a price of $ 1,685 and has since dropped to $ 212 in late August 2021, representing a drop of more than 85% in value in May. This means that the material they used to extract chia will have to be sold.

In some cases, Chia's old miners sell their used SSDs pretending they're brand new. This could cause disappointment, as one would expect a new record to last for years rather than months.

This means that they will sell them below market value, as Chia tracking can destroy average SSDs within two months, plus it is claimed that used drives that are bought in bulk are subsequently refurbished. and they are sold like new, where the demand for these discs is still very high. So it's probably only a matter of time before these revamped SSDs are released to other markets like the rest of Asia, Europe, and the United States.


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