It seems that the first “ecological” experiment in cryptomining did not take off. Launched last May by programmer Bram Cohen (creator of the BitTorrent protocol), Chia Coin became known worldwide for not using GPUs to process and validate transactions, replacing them with the existing free space on storage units, both HDDs and SSDs.
However, after its initial boom, the digital currency dropped to less than 15% of its initial peak value, prompting miners to favor other platforms. As a result, says the Vietnamese website VnExpress, these owners of “mining farms” began to discard reselling used storage devices, but offering the parts as new.
Administrator of a Facebook group of more than 5,000 Chia merchants, user Hoang Trung noticed a “tsunami” of HDD and SDD offers at low prices and explained to VnExpress that “Chia’s price fluctuation has caused investors sell their hardware at a loss.”
The (brief) history of Chia Coin
Source: Andrey Zhuravlev/iStock/reproduction Source: Andrey Zhuravlev/iStock
The idea of the possibility of a green cryptomining caught the attention of the world’s media around the world. The new Proof of Space (PoS) mining technique is based on the amount of storage on the dedicated hard drive, rather than the traditional Proof of Work (PoW) used by general cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
However, as with any type of mining, users went en masse to purchase huge amounts of storage hardware for Chia plotting, causing immediate shortages of SSDs and HDDs. However, after reaching a value of US$1,700, crypto fell, in three months, to the current US$220. As a result, some miners are going out of business.
At the time of Chia’s announcement, the price of a 6TB HDD had jumped to $286, more than 60% higher than suggested by the manufacturer. Today, that price has returned to the original US$110.
Sources: TomsHardware, vnExpress, Tecmundo.
