In 2017, Bram Cohen, author of the BitTorrent protocol, founded the Chia Network and developed Chia (XCH) as a potential rival to Bitcoin (BTC). Although hardly considered among the top cryptocurrencies of 2020, Chia has been making waves in recent months. The platform was valued at $500 million in a recent investment round and will reportedly aim for an IPO before the end of the year. David Fraze, a managing partner at Richmond Global, likened Chia to “what Bitcoin would look like if it was designed with knowledge from the last 13 years.”
Prior to its launch in May 2021, countries like China, Taiwan, and Vietnam reportedly experienced shortages of hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), with producers like Seagate working hard to adjust to market demand. This is because Chia aimed to replace the energy-intensive system of Bitcoin by instead requiring miners to devote hard drive space to generating and storing data. This means that Chia miners must find ways to build PCs with enough hard drive space to earn the most, as rewards are given out to those with the most space used up. As more drives are built into circuit boards and circuits become more complex, PCB grounding design becomes a problem. Mixed-signal integrated circuits, with both digital and analog ports, compound problems. As such, Chia miners opt for large-capacity drives – and NVMe drives, in particular – to be able to support the mining process.
The price for these types of drives has reportedly gone up in the past week, particularly as some SSDs can only be used a certain number of times for mining Chia before they inevitably break. David Gerard, author of Libra Shrugged, explains that, “Instead of just wasting electricity, Chia chews through SSDs at a fantastic rate, and also has thoroughly wrecked the market for big HDs.” This could potentially cause not just an extended shortage of hard drives, but also an increase in the amount of electronic waste generated by the mining community. Aggelos Kiayias of the University of Edinburgh emphasizes that it’s important to analyze whether the benefits of these new cryptocurrency technologies justify the massive resources they consume. “Given the current numbers, being merely less resource hungry compared to bitcoin is a rather low bar as far as ‘green’ technology is concerned,” he says.
Of course, other cryptocurrencies have also had similar effects on hardware markets. Bitcoin has notoriously been implicated in blackouts in Iran. As a result, the Iranian government has banned the resource-draining process until at least late September. Mining Ethereum (ETH) also caused huge shortages in high-end graphics cards, causing Nvidia to release products with restrictions preventing them from being used for mining. As cryptocurrencies gain more traction, demand for the tools needed to mine them grows.
Cohen has discouraged the use of consumer hardware to mine Chia, but the platform’s own website says that it can be done by “anyone with a mobile phone [or] laptop”, encouraging many more speculators to attempt to jump on board before the currency sees increased demand.
