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by kevingadd 1862 days ago
Technically plotting is the really bad part, farming mostly just occupies storage and uses a bit of CPU. Not that I personally am a fan of either, but plotting is the destructive part and then you 'farm' the completed plot forever and that can be done on inexpensive spinning rust drives by a cheap PC.
1 comments
meltedcapacitor 1862 days ago
Can you "plot" at the chip factory (producing some sort of pre-plotted ROM) or does it have to be updated in some way?
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guimoz 1862 days ago
A plot is basically a 100GB file (or file) that is associated with your public key. You can move it around how you want. Many people are creating them on machines with nvme disk and then they are copied over a network storage somewhere else.
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duskwuff 1862 days ago
The plots are each unique, and are too large (hundreds of GB) to represent as a ROM.
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viraptor 1862 days ago
Sounds like it's only a matter of time. We didn't have an incentive to create chips like the before, but just like with the specialised mining ASICs, we may see one soon.
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blibble 1862 days ago
if you can build an SSD that's hundreds of GB you can certainly build a ROM...
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duskwuff 1862 days ago
Flash memory is uniform. Every flash memory die is (hopefully) identical to the next one. Once you know how to produce a flash memory die of a given size, you can produce a million of them, and that's worth a million times more.

Chia plots are unique. Producing two copies of one isn't just pointless, but undesirable; it means that someone else might get a copy and reap the rewards instead of the person who plotted it.

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meltedcapacitor 1862 days ago
The idea is you plot into a one time programmable thing either at the factory or on first use (so single die, multiple values).

That said it needs to be cheaper than HD, as the SSD is apparently only used to build the plot, so maybe impractical indeed.

Curious that the plotting hasn't already moved to DRAM, apparently 256GB is needed to build a plot which is not too wild on server-class computers.

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duskwuff 1861 days ago
> The idea is you plot into a one time programmable thing

... like flash memory?

Flash storage has been heavily optimized. You're not going to do any better than that with custom silicon.

> Curious that the plotting hasn't already moved to DRAM, apparently 256GB is needed to build a plot which is not too wild on server-class computers.

My understanding is that people have done the math, and using an SSD ends up being cheaper, even considering the fact that it'll wear out prematurely. (And, in the case of hosting services like Scaleway, the miner isn't concerned -- their hosting provider is the one burdened by this usage.)

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