Miners of the new Chinese cryptocurrency Chia, which should become the “best bitcoin”, are buying up all available SSD-drives in order to mine the coin. This caused a shortage of SSD drives in Asia.
In Southeast Asia, a frenzied demand for fast and capacious SSDs began. Thus, in Hong Kong, prices for SSDs ranging from 4 TB to 16 TB increased by $ 25- $ 75. Chinese SSD maker Jiahe Jinwei has revealed that all 1TB and 2TB NVMe drives have been sold out.
The Chia project is built on the Proof of Space and Time algorithm, which uses users’ disk space to confirm transactions. In order to create such a validator, you need an SSD disk and a fast processor, however, after the process is completed, the cryptocurrency is mined without using significant client capacities.
One so-called “raft” takes up just over 100 GB of space, but it takes 15 to 20 hours to build it even on fairly fast processors. After that, the “raft” can be moved to regular hard drives.
“Rafts” are collections of “lottery tickets” on users’ hard drives. The network generates a random set of numbers and the network participant, which contains such a set, gets the right to confirm the next block. In this case, the number of “rafts” a user has is limited only by the volume of his drives. Thus, when confirming transactions and mining the Chia cryptocurrency, insignificant computer resources are used.
Note that at the moment Chia cryptocurrency is not traded on any exchange. The creator of the BitTorrent protocol, Bram Cohen, announced the development of the Chia Network back in late 2017. In 2018, BitTorrent was acquired by the Tron project, which also received a small stake in the Chia Network.
