It might seem that cloud computing and the Internet of Things will be most responsible for generating data that needs to be stored somehow. As it turns out, both of these things may soon be broken by a new cryptocurrency – Chia.
We’ve all heard about cryptocurrencies by now. If we are not even interested in money, it is hard not to notice how much they spoiled the graphics card market. After all, it is these components that are used to “dig” them – that is, to solve complex mathematical calculations in exchange for digital money.
Meanwhile, a completely new cryptocurrency has appeared in China – Chia. When it comes to the investment values themselves, it does not differ much from Bitcoin or Ethereum, but the mechanism of its extraction is completely different. Instead of graphics cards, Chia uses SSDs.
Typically, to mine a cryptocurrency, you simply need to perform a series of complex mathematical calculations. Chia works completely different – there are huge amounts of ready-made results on the discs involved in mining. When there is a “puzzle” to be solved, the system begins to check if there is a solution on the disk.
As you can easily guess, it requires a really huge capacity. Right now, Chia is using a total of 1.4 exabytes of data on all the drives running on her network – that’s 1.14 million terabytes!
On the one hand, the operating system of this cryptocurrency is somewhat better than the others – it consumes much less electricity. And this is a really important thing, Bitcoin itself uses it as much a year as the whole of Argentina!
On the other hand, this is very bad news for consumers. SSDs are about to start to rise in price and become less and less available, just like graphics cards in early 2020. Manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital have already begun to report the first problems with keeping up with demand.
So if you are planning to buy a good SSD disk (you do not have to worry too much about those with a capacity of less than 1TB), it is better not to postpone the purchases until later. The problems have not yet reached Europe, but it is only a matter of a few months at most.
