One of the big problems with Bitcoin is that each transaction requires a significant amount of energy to be validated. To avoid such waste, several alternative cryptocurrencies are abandoning the principle of proof of work, which is costly in energy, in favor of other solutions such as proof of stake or proof of possession, which do not require special computing power.
Bram Cohen, the creator of the cryptocurrency Chia, became interested in the space test. The principle is simple: when a block is forged in the chain of blocks, it is propagated to the nodes of the network. When a miner finds one of these blocks, he publishes it to the rest of the network.
The others provide the best proof of space, that is, of the storage that they can make available to the network. The best three are quickly distributed to the network, and one of the "time servers" it contains confirms the time the test was provided and thus validates the new block.
The idea is that everyone has free storage space that could be used to validate these transactions without generating additional consumption costs.
In summary, To get Chia tokens, you need a space test. The more storage space you have, the better your chances of getting a proof of space, the more Chia tokens you can earn.
To be more precise, Chia is a smart blockchain and transaction platform that aims to provide all the benefits of a standard cryptocurrency: decentralization, efficiency, and security.
But its unique selling point is 'agriculture', a substitute for mining that is not supposed to pollute the environment (in cryptocurrencies, 'agriculture' consists of depositing units of a virtual currency into a liquidity pool in a DeFi protocol, in order to benefit from the rewards. Lenders are rewarded in the form of tokens,
Chia was launched in 2017, a release that has been relatively low-key in the mainstream media. Chia Network was founded by American computer scientist Bram Cohen, who also invented the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing system.
On May 3, 2021, he announced the launch of Chiacoin (XCH), which uses storage on your hard drive to "farm" new tokens. All you need is 100 GB of clusters on a unit called patches.
Suppose this is a block of data that occupies 100 GB of space, each of which consists of a cluster. The more plots you have, the greater the chances of growing Chiacoin.
Although Chia was originally supposed to take advantage of a laptop's unused storage space, things are now spiraling out of control as miners acquire all the storage space available on the market to improve their chances of getting tokens and for that matter. So much real money.
Miners use hard drives to allocate as much space as possible for lucrative, low-cost crypto mining or 'farming'. Nonetheless, financial analysts believe that while hard drive prices have risen in recent weeks due to Chia token mining and will continue to be higher than normal for some time to come.
As a result, the prices of higher capacity hard drives have risen in recent weeks, as the high-end models have sold out.
The market is experiencing a short supply of hard drives, which is comparable to the situation in 2012 when the floods in Thailand stopped the production of hard drives in the country. At the time, average hard drive prices rose about 22%, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Sidney Ho. This time the price increases will not be so high.
On the drive price analysis side, it is reported that the prices of mid-range hard drives with a capacity of 6TB or 8TB have not changed significantly in recent weeks. 10TB hard drives haven't gotten much more expensive either. Meanwhile, 12TB, 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB hard drives became considerably more expensive in a matter of weeks (some SKUs made $ 100, others doubled).
The vast majority of 14TB to 18TB hard drives are nearline drives, such as Seagate's Exos and Western Digital's WD Gold and Ultrastar. Most of these units are sold directly to companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft at preset prices and are therefore never retailed.