Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jleagle 1841 days ago
By cryptocurrencies do you just mean BitCoin? Most new crypto's use proof of stake which doesn't use up GPUs.

Not heard it blamed for using up hard drives before.

3 comments

Bitcoin mining also doesn't use GPUs any more, as far as I know that space is almost entirely custom ASICs.

> Most new crypto's use proof of stake

What (of any substantial volume) uses proof of stake at the moment? That's Ethereum's path, but it's not there yet.

Regarding hard drives, I think it's "Chia" that just purposely uses an insane amount of disk space; "proof of space": https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/26/new-crypt...

> almost entirely custom ASICs

Those are still a cause for chip shortages as crypto customers bid themselves to the front of the line at TSMC:

"Chip manufacturing is already under huge pressure to meet demand, and TSMC is facing a serious water shortage in Taiwan on top of that. Bitmain's order only adds to the pressure, but TSMC clearly wouldn't agree to production if it didn't think it had the spare capacity. Anyone attempting to place new chip orders in the future may end up with a different outcome, though."

https://www.pcmag.com/news/cryptocurrency-miners-are-getting...

Chia coin is using Proof of Space. It is growing really fast and not a really good thing. Even cloud providers are reacting to it. See https://blog.scaleway.com/scaleway-and-chia/
>Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks

More like Proof of SSD-shredding.

> Not heard it blamed for using up hard drives before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_(cryptocurrency)