December 7, 2021 • 45 mins
Jonmichael Hands, VP Storage at Chia talks about how Chia's energy efficient blockchain raises the stake for nakamoto consensus and proof of work .
Before joining Chia, Jonmichael spent the last ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group. In addition, he served as the chair for NVM Express (NVMe), SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SSD special interest group and Open Compute Project for open storage hardware innovation.
twitter handle : https://twitter.com/lebanonjon
Chia Keybase : https://keybase.io/team/chia_network.public as @Storage_jm
Read Chia how to guides on : https://chiadecentral.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
That's kind of the magic of chiais that hard drives are really
(00:03):
power efficient be a reallyexciting part about chia is you
don't need some like fancy highend equipment to, you know, be
partaking in the network. Allyou need is a hard drive and a
desktop and you just go on yourmerry way. When the media was
very sensationalizing aboutearly on in their life oh my
god, you know, chia will wearout your consumer SSD in like 10
days. funny Bram and I wroteextensively on this topic so
(00:25):
infuriating because there arethese things called Data Center
SSDs is you can buy them used oneBay for $100 bucks or $200
bucks that have 10s of petabytesof, of write endurance where you
can write to before it wears outsidebar proof of steak proof of
steak sucks, true believers andproof of steak won't tell you
that. But that's why these proofof steak systems don't have 10s
of 1000s or hundreds of 1000s ofvalidators.
(00:46):
John, I would say you're wrong.
Vitalik is our God. Hahaha. Hey,guys, today I have the
opportunity to interview JohnMichaels. He's the VP of storage
at Chia. Before I take you tothe interview, I just want to
clarify that this podcast seriesis a passion project of mine and
my buddy Matt, which we startedout of curiosity. I believe
(01:09):
we've been very fortunate tomeet all our crypto heroes talk
with them been an amazingjourney so far. Also, thank you
everyone for their support. Itkeeps me going. Alright, without
any further adieu, let's nowhear from John.
(01:40):
I spent the last 10 years atIntel as a product manager for
the data center, NVMe SSDs. AtIntel, I joined chin in may,
which was pretty wild. But Iactually was participating in
the chia right right around theend of alpha, kind of like the
middle of 2020 like June Juneish, which is kind of funny, I
(02:01):
thought I thought more peoplefrom the storage industry would
be interested in you know, acrypto based on storage. You
know, what I saw was founded byBram Cohen. I was obviously a
longtime a BitTorrent user, andthen the college dorm room. So I
was certainly drawn into it. Andso, you know, I kind of helped
out and join the community, justas a big farmer, you know, I was
helping out on writing the wikisfor plotting and farming and
(02:24):
helping people out with SSDs. Inthe beginning, the plotters, you
know, it's funny now that theplotting is, you know, hundreds
of times if, you know, basicallymore efficient than it was, you
know, in the alpha, and, youknow, 10s of times more
efficient than it was kind of atthe beginning of the main net
launch. So, but yeah, that wasmore a lot of the what my
background and expertise in SSDskind of helped out the team
(02:46):
early when they were developingthe plotters.
Great, so John, by the way. Sowhat is, first of all, what does
mining look like in chia? Andwhat is plotting that you just
mentioned? And I've also, forthe sake of our audience, I'm
(03:07):
saying there's plotting andfarming. So if you can sort of,
decipher the two of these termsthat are specific to to project
Yeah, mining is a bad word itchia. We don't we don't like the
word mining. And it seems kindof ridiculous at first saying
like, Okay, why did we inventall this new terminology for
(03:28):
farming and plotting, but reallyis it's a brand new consensus.
So I think most of you guys mayknow, within a chia that we use
something called Proof of spaceand time, which is basically
using an allocated harddrivespace and you're using that to
secure the network. And you'reusing this as opposed to using
like CPU or hashing resources,like you do in proof of work.
(03:48):
And there's something kind ofmagical about this, this
farming, which is so so one, thewhole idea of like, why this
needed to be invented was weneeded a more energy conscious
model for cryptocurrencies thatdidn't sacrifice on security.
So, you know, there's a lot oftalk about proof of stake. And
I'm sure we'll go there at somepoint today, because it's hard.
(04:08):
It's hard to talk aboutconsensus and crypto without
talking about, you know, theother competing consensus
mechanisms, but a lot of proofof stake is touted as kind of
this energy efficientalternative to proof of work,
but, you know, they've beentalking about it, especially
etherium, you know, since 2014.
And yet to have actually shippedit there are there are many,
obviously, you know, you know,chains that are shipping proof
(04:30):
of stake, but it doesn't comewith all the trade offs and
people those are kind ofoverlooked. So in chia, you
know, go back to, you know,again, we don't we don't call it
mining, we call it you know,farming, and the other word we
use and chia is plotting, whichis kind of the act of creating
these plots, you're basicallyinitializing the proofs of space
into this compact form. Now alla plot is is a file that sits on
(04:51):
the hard drive. And once youcreate these files, you
basically just sequentially copythem over to harddrive where
they basically just sit, you canthink of these plot files, kind
of like bingo cards, where thethe network, in this case,
there's this perfect time, whichis the VDF or verifiable delay
function that basically call outa challenge. And a farmer
(05:12):
basically checks the plot ontheir hard drive to see if one
is supposed to challenge. And inevery interval, which we call
signage point, if you basicallyhave a proof of space that is
better than than the one thatwas challenged, then you can
respond to the network, you canmake the next block, and you get
your Chia as reward. So thisincentivizes people to
basically, you know, participatein putting their hard drive
(05:34):
space up to the network. And sothere's just one time thing we
have to do plotting, which isbasically create the files. Once
they're done, they basicallyjust sit on the hard drive,
mostly idle. And that's kind ofthe magic of chia is that hard
drives are really powerefficient. And obviously, SSDs
are even more power efficient,but they're a little bit more
expensive, per per gigabyte. Butonce your plots are on the hard
(05:55):
drive, the hard drive basicallyjust sits there idle. And then
the person who has the harddrive space can basically earn
rewards for farming. And theycan do this in a pool. And I'll
talk a little bit about if wewant to talk about, you know why
the chia pooling protocol isvery sophisticated and good, but
that the really exciting partabout chia is you don't need
some like fancy high endequipment to you know, be
(06:15):
partake in the network, all youneed is a hard drive and a
desktop and you just go on yourmerry way, there's even people
that are doing their farming onlike a Raspberry Pi 4
So talk about a little bit aboutplotting. And so from what I
understood, plotting is itoccupies some space on your
(06:35):
disk. It's similar to like,proof of work what you do in
Bitcoin. So these are basicallycryptography, cryptographic
proofs, I believe that justoccupy space on your desk, once
you you kind of create a plotright? Or stand correctly. Yeah,
it'sin for those who want to go into
(06:56):
the nitty gritty, you know, wehave a what's called a proof of
space construction document,that's part of our consensus
that kind of goes into how theseare, are made. But some of the
magic of why Chia works is someof the cryptographic and
mathematical breakthroughs. Oneof those was the verifiable
delay function, which were thefirst to ship in the actual
(07:16):
production system. And the otherthat proof of time but the
others is proof of space. Soit's Bram invented is this nice,
proof of space format, where youhave these cryptographic hashes,
and you lay them out in thesecertain tables. And then once
you lay out all this randomdata, you basically take that
data and you sort it and thencompress it. And this is
algorithmic compression, intonice, neat, compact format, so
(07:38):
that it can't be manipulated.
And this process this plottingprocess is this this is CPU and
you know, storage intensive, asfar as like iops and disk drives
and stuff like that. But oncethat's done, they never need to
do it again, for that file, thefile just gets created this 108
gigabyte file, and then it justsits there, and you can just
(07:59):
copy it over to whatever,whatever the cheapest possible
storage medium is, which todayis hard drives. So the fun part
of plotting is this is kind oflike the fun part where you
know, where I come into myexpertise, necessities and
background and data centersystems is the goal of plotting
is to try to make as many plotsas you can on a given system.
(08:20):
And the fun of it is there'sthere's now three different
community community plotters,besides the plotter that we ship
with. And so now there's tons ofdifferent ways and system
combinations where you can dothis plotting where you have
different amounts of DRAM andtemporary SSD and CPU cores. And
there's not really a one sizefits all solution to this, this
is kind of a fun computationalproblem, because now you're
(08:42):
trying to say, hey, how do wemake these plots as fast as
possible? In begininng of chia,that was really, really
important, because, you know,the net space was extremely
small, and the difficulty waslow. And it was a kind of an
arms race to get all the storageplotted. But now, now that the
network is over 40 exabytes, youknow, it's not really a huge
race to get on the platform.
(09:04):
So okay, so the plottingoccupies space on a hard drive,
and it probably on an average,how much does it take to create
a plot andfarm so in chia, you have
farming, which you basicallyhave your plots that live on the
hard drive, right. The plottingis just this act of creating the
plots and you don't need, youknow, hard drive we can most
(09:26):
people are using for plotting,they're using an SSD as a
temporary storage because SSDsare much faster than hard
drives, of course, but you canyou can plot directly to hard
drive, it's just much muchslower. And people prefer to
plot it like data center SSDsthat have high endurance. You
can also if you have a lot ofDRAM plot completely in memory.
And this is the fastest way toplot but obviously the most
expensive because you know DRAMis much more expensive than SSDs
(09:49):
or hard drives.
So more plots means more chanceof winning. It's almost like a
bingo card like more cards youhave like you increase your
chances of winning probabilityof winning, it's not a sure shot
in in blockchain world like itshouldn't be. That's how it's
designed. So it increases yourprobability. So more plots you
(10:11):
have, and more space.
Maybe it's good thing to stepback on, in chia, we have this
thing called the net space. Andthis is our representation of
all the storage that's out onthe network. And this is very
similar to hash rate in likeBitcoin or etherium, or any
proof of work chains. The netspace is the total amount of
capacity out there. Now, yourprobability of winning is
(10:33):
directly proportional to yourcapacity that you're farming,
which have all the sum of allthe plots that you have,
basically, divided by the totalnetspace. And so it's very
similar to hash rate in thatregards where the more storage
you have, the higher chance youhave of winning. And this is
where the economics get reallyvery interesting and different
(10:53):
compared to like proof of workwhere in proof of work, you're
basically trading a massiveamount of electricity. For the
resource, obviously, like minersand graphics cards are
expensive, but they also consumea tremendous amount of power,
hard drives, really the majorityof the cost is harddrive, once
you have the data copiedharddrive, it sits there idle
(11:13):
about five watts, and you know,this is pretty significant
difference between like, youknow, say like an ant miner
that's at three kilowatts, or3300 Watts, you know, versus a
five watt harddrive, it istotally different. So, that's,
that's really, the exciting partabout chia is that the economics
of how the incentives work, nowthat you have the harddrive
(11:33):
space where to keep the storageonline, it actually requires a
very low amount of power, youknow, compared to proof of work.
Alright, so that's great. That'sgreat. John, a Chia has been
compared to Bitcoin, of course,obviously, because of the
consensus mechanism it borrowsfrom Bitcoin, and also, you
know, other things that has doneon top of it, which are, you
(11:55):
know, I would say improvementson it on the proof of work, and
consensus or Nakamoto.
consensus. So you mentionedenergy usage. And, you know,
sometimes I hear these proof ofstake, folks talk about oh,
well, proof of stake solvesthat. Over proof of work, but
does it really? And so that's myfirst question. And the second
(12:17):
question is, you know, thenthere is a talk about, hey,
proof of stake uses, you know,no energy or some something like
that. But, you know, if youthink about it, everything uses
energy, right? Nothing is forfree. And this, you know, laws
of physics, thermodynamics,whatever you want to call it. So
yeah, so those two questions Ihave, like, I'll stop there.
(12:41):
Yeah, it's pretty funny. Youknow, Chris Dixon, Twitter
posted something on Twitter,like the other day, about, you
know, reposting something thatSolana had posted, they posted
something on their website aboutthe cost per transaction of
Solana. So this is kind of asilly metric, right, you just
basically take the annual energyconsumption of the network and
you divided by the total amountof transactions that your your
(13:04):
network could support. And thenyou have a theoretical lower
bounds on like what thetransaction, energy per
transaction is, and I'll say,will lead up to kind of why
that's kind of a little bitmisleading, where proof of stake
it definitely is lower energyconsumption than everything out
there. It's a proof of work, youknow, the energy thing is not
being blown out of the water, itis absolute disaster. You know,
(13:28):
Bitcoin, you know, the CambridgeBitcoin electricity study. And
then I used the economist askind of the sources, but you
know, it goes anywhere from like130 to 180 terawatt hours per
year of electricity use. The allthe data centers in the world,
you know, are a little over 200terawatt hours. So just to
compare Bitcoin versus that it'slike kind of equivalent. That
(13:48):
doesn't sound very good, right?
So obviously, proof of work hasenergy problems. And so proof of
stake it does solve the energyproblem, right. But if you only
have 1000, or 2000, validatorselectricity consumption, the
network is absurdly easy tocalculate you to say you
calculate the number ofvalidators. And in this case,
when I say validator, I mean, anactual physical system now in
ethereum two eth-2 a validatoris like every 32 eth, that
(14:11):
you're validating to thenetwork, or staking to the
network, but like, you can havemultiple those on the same
system. And that's kind ofdisingenuous, I think, right? A
validator, I think, is anindependent entity who has
running a system. And no, so tocalculate the energy use of
proof of stake, it's reallyeasy. You just add up the number
of validators that have physicalsystems, you kind of profile
what that system looks like. Andthen you look at the energy
(14:32):
utilization. And, you know, sumit up, and then look at what
that consumes over the course ofa year for the annual energy
consumption. So that's very low,right? If you only have 1000
validators at that's not verymuch energy. It's just 1000
servers. It's not it's not atremendous amount of energy,
sorry to interrupt. So when youcompare that with say, 400,000
plus validators, which chiacurrently has, if I'm not
(14:55):
mistaken or nodes, spread acrossand compare that apples To
apples or any other project. Andso, you know, it'll be
interesting to see what thosenumbers are. Yeah. And
so you can't compare. You can'tcompare power utilization
without comparing security. Andright if you if you think about
like, okay, the market. Now youknow that Ethereum and it's
(15:16):
number two and Bitcoin is numberone cryptocurrency. So the
market believes that proof ofwork is the most secure
protocol, just as defined by themarket cap of the top two coins,
right? The market believes thatproof of work is the most
secure. And that's where all themoney is going today. And you
can kind of let the market votefor how these things work. Now,
when you're comparing, you know,say, you know, I'll get to we've
(15:40):
done, obviously, a tremendousamount of work on, you know, the
chia energy consumption, that'spart of my day job. But I'll get
to there in a sec, when you lookat like, in a proof of stake
network, you know, you're havinga massive trade off for this
system that consumes low energy,but you're saying instead of
physical systems that people aregoing to basically buy to secure
(16:00):
the network and put real energyor work in proof of work to
basically secure the network,you're saying, well, they're
gonna put their money at stake.
And obviously, that has somemassive trade offs, where it's
much more challenging to reachconsensus, and they have lots of
ways to solve this problem. Andthen each one of them, or each
one of the solutions, basicallycomes comes with its own set of
(16:20):
problems. I love basically, Bramdid a talk at Stanford a couple
years ago on chia, and he had akind of an introduction. And one
of the slides that he has iscalled the sidebar proof of
stake, proof of stake sucks. Andthen he has three slides of
basically go on to talk about,like, how terrible proof of
stake is, and all the trade offsthat people are ignoring, as far
(16:40):
as security and slashing andbonding, and the nothing at
stake problem and all thesenuances of like, like, you know,
in in proof of stake, you needthis thing called weak. So weak
subjectivity where you basicallyneed to trust some validators in
where the Chia its Nakamotoconsensus, you basically just
look at any peer and decide whohas the longest chain, you trust
(17:00):
the longest chain, there's no,you know, if you were offline,
for a while you come back, youdon't need like a trusted set of
validators appears, you justcompute peer to peer network,
get a bunch of peers, and thenfigure out which was the longest
chain and you trust that one.
And that's the beauty ofNakamoto consensus. And so when
you're looking at, again, proofof stake, of course, it has low
(17:24):
energy consumption, becauseyou're trading off the security
as far and they won't tell youpeople that are true believers.
And proof of stake won't tellyou that. But that's why these
proof of stake systems don'thave 10s of 1000s, or hundreds
of 1000s of validators, theyhave, you know, single digit
hundreds, or, you know, maybe1000 Couple 1000 validators,
it's almost impossible. Becauseof all these problems, you have
(17:47):
to have a professional validatorthat has the right security
model that understands how to dothe staking, because if you
don't, the coins get slashed.
And slashing means they takeaway all your stake, that's not
good. So you really have to beprofessional to do this stuff.
Whereas in chia, you know, ifyou put up your hard drive to
the network, it's no big deal.
You know, you anybody canbasically do it.
(18:10):
John, I would say you're wrong.
Vitalik is our God. Andvery, very sad. I did, I did
have to read some very oldVitalik blog posts on my
research and proof of stake, youknow, which dated back to like,
2014, which is funny, becauselike, they've been talking about
this stuff forever. Our joke islike, you know, when is eth 2
gonna finally ship? It's like,you know, it's one of those
(18:31):
things. It'scoming. It's coming. Next year,
every, every year. Alright, sothat's fantastic. You know, so
Yeah, another point to yoursecurity point that you just
made is, and a lot of folks inIndia also when I talk to them,
they say, oh, you know, scaling,scaling, and I'm like, dude,
scaling is not the issue here.
(18:53):
It's the security is the numberone issue. And to me, Gene, Gene
brought this point home. He hada statement. the other day, I
think I was listening to histalks. And he said, If you go to
like the top CEOs, or go tobanks and all these companies
and tell them, please implementthis blockchain, but it's gonna
(19:17):
have like, it's gonna have thesmart contract bugs, every well
bugs, every software has bugs,but still, like it's gonna lose
money every two months, threemonths, four months. And what do
you what do you think is goingto be the CEOs reaction of this
big bank? And of course, theywant something that's much much,
(19:38):
much more secure, or likelightyears secure than what's
existing, right?. So that partis often overlooked in the
consumer mindset or the marketspeculators, which like, oh,
scalability, let's jump there.
Like, what about security? Yeah.
And back to that originalquestion you asked me which was
like, what is the energyconsumption of chia We wrote up
(20:01):
our model at Chia power dot org,that's the model I have, it's
pretty easy. Basically just lookat the net space, the total
amount of storage out there inthe world that is allocating
their space to the network. Andthen you basically profile what
a different set of farmers lookslike as far as what kind of hard
drives are using what kind ofsystems are using. And then you
make estimations on the kind ofbounded range of the energy
(20:22):
consumption of those individualhard drives. And then you sum
that all up. And you know, rightnow we're at about point three
terawatt hours of electricityconsumption on the chia network,
which again, is massively higherthan proof of stake, but it is
600 times less than Bitcoin. Sowhat we have is what we think of
really a good sweet spot wherewe have, of course, we have real
(20:43):
physical assets that are securein the network in this case, in
chia right now, there's, youknow, speaking as like the end
of November, there's about 40exabytes of storage on the
network and the net space. Andthat has about a billion dollars
worth of storage. So it's realcapex secure in the network. And
not only that is it's, you know,the security, basically, in
Nakamoto consensus, you need 51%to do you know, these attack,
(21:06):
well, to get 51% of thatstorage, now, you need to go buy
20x bytes, which has a, youknow, a, you need an entire data
center space worth entire datacenter worth of space, you need,
you know, half a billiondollars, and you need about a
year lead time to go pull thatoff. So, even already, you know,
just less than a year into thisChia mainnet, you know, we feel
like we're in a pretty goodspace for network security. The
(21:28):
other thing, because it's soeasy to be a farmer, all you
need is a hard drive in adesktop. You know, we have
anywhere from like, 300 to400,000 nodes in the network.
And so this is just, you know,again, we're, you know, 400 400
times larger than most of theseproof of stake networks, as far
as number of independentvalidators in our network, we
call them farmers.
Cool. You know, just to put outthere, disclaimer, I am a Chia
(21:53):
project fan. And so,particularly because of this
reason that you mentioned, andit for me, this statement sums
up that, you know, underpromise, under promise and
overdeliver is is what I've seenchia engineers do time, and
again, and I am not gonnatotally completely put those eth
(22:17):
guys under the bus. I mean, theycan worship their god, my God is
better technology chops andtechnical folks. So, you know, I
leave it at that, you know, Ifeel like playing a part in the
ecosystem, like being a nodevalidator or a person running
(22:37):
full node. I feel like, youknow, it's like an empowering
thing for the for the, forsomebody who wants to take part
in this new blockchainecosystem. For those folks, is
it easy to get set up, say, youknow, on their regular desktops
and old computers? to just getstarted? Start with the farming
(23:02):
process or plotting process?
Yeah, absolutely. So where do westart? You know, the only really
unique requirement about chiaplotting is it's, there's a lot
of disk rights, which, you know,the media was very
sensationalizing about early onin the right Oh, my God, you
know, chia will wear out yourconsumer SSD in like 10 days,
(23:23):
and funny, Bram and I wroteextensively on this topic so
infuriating because you thereare these things called Data
Center SSD is you can buy themuse on eBay for 100 bucks or 200
bucks, that have 10s ofpetabytes of write endurance
where you can write to before itwears out. So in chia, it's
very, what we recommend topeople to get to plotting if
(23:44):
they go pick up kind of a useddatacenter SSD to start or, you
know, kind of a high TBW, that'sterabytes written is how SSDs
are measured in endurance. Butyou have to start now, if you're
only plotting, like, you know,couple hard drives, now, that
doesn't matter, just usewhatever SSD you have laying
around. But if you're going tobe serious in planning, like
hundreds of terabytes, then nowyou kind of need some kind of
(24:05):
dedicated SSD for plotting. Now,the plotting performance is
basically how fast you make theplots is based on the amount of
CPU cores, you have the DRAM andthen you need this kind of fast
temporary SSD storage. And themore those you have, the faster
plots you have. So that's reallya question of like, like if
you're filling up a couple harddrives, it doesn't really matter
(24:26):
don't go do not go out and buydedicated you know, quitter for
this just use what you havelaying around to there's no
options, people do this, likeplotting as a service or cloud
plotting where you can, if youhave fast enough internet, you
can pay like a very littleamount. Yeah, it was very high
in the beginning of the network,because, you know, obviously
there was a lot of competition,people could price these very
high but you know, I expect theprice to basically download a
(24:48):
plot over time to get basicallyvery close to like what the
actual energy consumption is.
And so if you don't have likeall these, you know, high end
system laying around forplotting, you want to feel the
drive. That's it. So selectingan SSD is something we've been
kind of spending a lot of timewith what I spend a lot of time
trying to educate people on isdoing with bram bram had this
funny Twitter post, which waslike, you know, basically like,
(25:10):
you wouldn't take a nonstick panand you know, clean it with a
steel wall and then be like,Hey, I don't know what happened
to this is weird, it got ruinedyou basically selecting the
wrong tool for the job like,yes, there, there are many tools
out there that exists. If youuse like a low end, crappy
consumer SSD, that, you know,these are made for, like read
heavy workloads. Most people,you know, these SSDs again,
(25:33):
included with these like four or$500 laptops, you know, these
aren't like super high end SSD.
This is just like kind ofcrappy, low end NAND. And you
know that they're just meant tobe kind of power efficient and
low cost, right, these SSDs are40 bucks, 30 bucks are included
in some of these low end laptopslike those are not going to be
suitable for for Chia plots. Butthere are plenty of options for
(25:57):
if people want to get superserious about chia and learn
more there. We have a ton ofwikis and how to guides. There's
a ton of information on the webabout like, where to start.
That's fantastic. I also go toChia decentral. I think I really
like that because it breaks downfor me. In fact, you know, a lot
of folks in my friend circle whowere interested in the project,
(26:18):
and they're like, oh, yeah, youknow, what, where can I get
started? And I was kind of sickof like, telling them to be
honest, like how to do this,because I have to like babysit
them. And then I'm like, here'sthe link, I this, this place
here goes step by step and talksabout it. And they know what
they're doing. So, so yeah, thatthat couple of sites like was
(26:40):
Chia decentral. And they're abunch of other sites that do
that. I felt like chia decentraldid a great job at like,
breaking it down step by stepfor, you know, little challenge
folks. And folks like me,I appreciate that. I know for
the for the folks listening, youknow, before I joined chia, my
friend and I started this blogcalled chia decentral. And I
write, I wrote all aboutplotting and farming. And really
(27:02):
early I had these like, basichow to guides on plotting, and
you know, that we would justblew up in March, April, like
earlier this year, like ourwebsite, just like completely
blew up. And then obviously,now, you know, I don't have as
much time to write for thewebsite, because I'm actually
working on the Chia website. Andyou know, when I post, like,
very long, long form blog posts,and I'm usually posting the chia
(27:25):
dotnet. But you know, we stillhave a YouTube for chia
decentral, it's up. And we talka little bit about plotting and
farming and just random techstuff I'm interested in which
funny, so it's really a tarun.
And I have this you know, mutualfriend, I was just at the Open
Compute Global Summit, which isjust like hardware event, you
know, there's like Facebook andMicrosoft and Intel, you guys,
(27:48):
these guys are there at thishardware event. And I ran into
Summit Puri, who's the CEO andco founder of Liquid. And I
remember early in the day,somebody on the keybase was
like, oh, has anybody and theyposted this video, the Linus
tech tips, you know, review ofthe liquid honey badger for, you
know, and somebody said, Hey,somebody has anybody tested
(28:10):
plotting on this, what I foundout that that person was Tarun.
And we're actually going to makethat happen. I'm going to talk
to him about getting my hands onone of these things, we can do
some fun benchmarking stuff onon the liquid system for chia.
That will be sweet, I would needsome of those plots. Wow. Okay.
That's amazing. Yeah, I'm gladthat you will make that happen.
(28:35):
And I've also heard quite a lotabout these Mad Max plotters,
John, Michael, it's, I actuallyhaven't got into it. But could
you talk a little bit more aboutit? I know, you have like a
complete session on YouTubeabout it a couple of sessions
about it.
I'll give it a quick you know,so for now, now, we're getting
(28:57):
down into the weeds of forpeople for the chia enthusiast
people that want to look intoit. So there are, you know,
there was the plotter, which isa member of the the chia
plotting is creating these filesthat we shipped the original,
you know, chia software with itwasn't very multi threaded or
pipeline, right, we've reallyfocused on getting the
(29:18):
cryptography right and canmaking it actually scale and
work as far as like producingreliable plots. And this guy
named goes by Madmax. I thinkhis real name is Hugo, basically
develop this pipeline to chiaplotter that basically multi
threaded a bit a ton of thephases for the chip plotting,
remember the chip plotting youwrite out, this random data and
(29:40):
then you sort it, that's whereall the disk writes happen, and
then you compress it. And sothese happen in different
phases, but basically the Madmaxplotter you know we're plotting
used to take like, you know, 12to 14 hours for a single plot.
The Mad Max plotter now whenlike a pretty high end system
can produce a plot like say 10to 15 minutes and I got an
average desktop can produce aplot between 20 and 40 minutes
(30:03):
is kind of the average time formost people's desktops right
now.
So, GM, here's the thing that Ioften get also, like people
folks are interested in thisproject. And to them.
Decentralization matters a lotlike all this, you know,
stories, or the narrative that'sbeen told to us, like a
(30:26):
decentralization is better, it'smore resilient. It's all of
that, and a lot of people buyinto that. But then they also go
into projects, which are kind ofhave this hidden centralization.
And so, you know, I think forme, the cases like, why should I
run this? Why should I createplots? Why should I farm,
(30:49):
because if I believe indecentralized world, I'm
contributing in my own way tothis. And with the expectation
that, you know, if I have plots,I'm not always going to win. So
I think it's for the folks outthere that want to enable that,
right. It's like, similar to theelectric car enthusiasts who
(31:14):
first wanted that electric car,it was discontinued by GM. And
then, you know, Tesla camealong, and they wanted that. So
just wanted to put it out there.
Like when people have thesequestions like, Oh, should I
just buy right away? Yeah, goahead, buy it, if you want. But
this is an additional thing,which is kind of makes you a
(31:34):
part of this whole blockchaininternet community. Anyways, so
my rant is over.
Love it , we make running a fullnode pretty easy. You know,
right now, the database is,let's say, 10s of gigabytes, you
know, it's kind of in like 20 to30 gigabyte range, if it's
(31:55):
compressed, you know, so that'snot terrible. You just basically
kind of look at whatever desktopyou have. And basically, to run
a full node, it's very lightrequirements. Like, if you
looked into the requirements forlike running into ethereum, full
node right now, your mind wouldexplode. Like, it's so bad.
Like, and it's funny me sayingthat I used to run an ethereum,
full node in 2017. And you couldrun a full copy of geth. And it
(32:17):
wasn't that bad. But these theseother chains have just like,
that's the one thing Bitcoingot, right, which was like, you
know, we make make sure runninga full node is easy, because if
decentralization matters, thenyou can't have it like 900 steps
and have super high end systemrequirements for running a full
node. If you want lots ofvalidators. If you want lots of
participants in the network forsecurity, you need to make it
(32:39):
super easy. The other thing isfunny this guy, you know, in,
yeah, of course, Twitterbattles, like I need to stay off
Twitter, because I really shouldnot be like me to argue, argue
with trolls, but like somebodywho's like, well, you know, we
call that I think one of these,you know, proof of stake
networks for only having 1000validators, and they're like,
Well, isn't 1000 validators,better than 12 mining pools, and
(33:00):
I said, how we solve thatproblem and chia, because if
you're in a pool, we have thisthing called the pooling
protocol, which is all done onchain, where the pool basically,
the participants of the pool ofthe farmers make their own
blocks. And the way it works isyou that that pool can play has
about 20 blocks to basicallyclaim that reward. And then the
farmer gets 1/8 of the farmingrewards, and then the pool gets
(33:22):
the remaining and then it'sdistributed most the pool, but
the farmer is the one actuallymaking the blocks, you don't
actually give up anydecentralization by pooling, and
now you smooth out the rewardsfor people that have only have a
small amount of capacity, rewardthem the network, now they don't
have to have some trade off. Andthis is the trade off, like the
people's arguments about, youknow, basically proof of stake
(33:43):
being centralized, because, youknow, basically promotes these
professional validators, and youknow, you want to do you don't
want to delegate to somesomebody that doesn't know what
they're doing. And it basicallygets it to the point where the
exchanges have all the moneybecause in proof of stake,
basically, your stake is theamount of money or the amount of
coins you have proportional tothe network. So it ends up being
(34:03):
these, you know, these big,large institutions, and these
exchanges end up being thepeople that have control over
the entire network. And thencome proof of work. People argue
that all these mining, you know,these these entities that
produce the mining equipment andhave these massive pools create
the centralization around pools,and that's definitely correct,
right. You know, we saw likewhen a China crackdown happened,
(34:25):
he went 50% Drop in hash rate inBitcoin. So there's definitely
like a large amount ofcentralization and pools based
on people who have access tothese to the latest and
greatest, you know, mininghardware. And so, yeah, chia has
really solved this problem andsaying, like, Okay, we want to
have our cake and eat it too. Wewant decentralization, and we
want people to be able to docool things. We want people to
(34:46):
be able to earn small amount ofrewards, but there's pooling
also incentivizes people with asmall amount of storage to join
the network. And, you know, it'snot like either rewards right
now are anywhere between like $1and $3 per terabyte. per month,
depending on how much storageyou have, which may not seem
like a lot to some people, butif you had the storage laying
(35:07):
around, it was underutilizedresource, if you had just two
hard drives sitting in yourshelf, or stack hard drives that
were just doing nothing, now youcan basically monetize those.
And that's precisely what a lotof people have done over the
last couple months as annetspace has kind of been
hovering around the same pricehas been kind of now what we
believe what I believe to bereaching kind of some some
(35:28):
equilibrium, but what we'll seewhat happens in future,
also, you know, it's also great,do it yourself kind of endeavor,
you know, in my personalexperience, you know, I had done
engineering long time ago, I hadforgotten a lot of things and,
you know, then setting up yourown just buying stuff, like from
from, from eBay, or like otherstuff and just playing around
(35:51):
with it. I think this is, it's agreat way to even understand and
and, you know, I know, peoplehad mentioned earlier, this
reminded them of like, the earlydays of Bitcoin when everybody
could run a full load. And so I,for me, it was like a great
learning experience. And I'mstill learning that there are so
many things to, you know, justhaving a J BOD, or like all
(36:16):
these, you know, how do you dothe storage properly? How do you
maintain it, and the actual,like utilization, like
electricity costs, and for mehas been just stable it it
wasn't that massive, even thoughI have like a very small farm.
But yeah, so the DYI part isalso where in countries like
India is also kind of going awaywith, you know, everybody's just
(36:38):
watching tick tock videos allday long. So that
I mean that exactly. And thatwas part of what was rewarding
about you know, we did Chiadecentral, in the beginning, I
was writing these guides, I'dhave all these people reaching
out to me, like, oh my god, I'ma Windows only guy and I finally
installed Ubuntu server and ISSH in and I felt like Linux
God. Like, it's so funny.
They're like, you know, thesepeople are just like, it's so
(36:59):
rewarding to hear that peopleyou know, into Chia have taken
it on as learning experience tobasically get better at system
administration and storage andunderstanding your computer
systems and building. It's a lotof fun to, like I mentioned, you
know, part of the fun is justlike, you know, getting these
parts off eBay, buildingsystems, benchmarking, comparing
versus others, that's kind of alot of the fun of the community.
(37:21):
You know, the early communitywas really based off the
plotting and farming communityas as we grow, chia and you
know, we didn't talk a lot abouttoday about all the other
awesome stuff that chia isdoing. I know you have had other
other chia folks on the podcastlike Bram and Gene, of course.
But you know, we are actualparticipation in developer
(37:41):
ecosystem and, you know, amountof apps that are being developed
on top of chia is now goingcrazy. And starting to ramp up,
we just released their chiaasset tokens a couple of weeks
ago. And there's already a bunchof a couple meme coins at
launch. And people are makinggames there's like Mojo dice,
which you can like, do this likegambling on chia. Now, there's
all these like, things poppingup. And this is just what
(38:03):
happens. It takes a long time.
You know, once the ecosystemstarts, it's really the core
technological community that aredoing the development. And at
now, you'll start to seedevelopers and other people
start rolling in to reallyuncover the magic of what makes
Chia so special. You know, thisthe coinset model, we pick,
again, very similar to Bitcoins,UTXO model, we believe has like
(38:25):
the more decentralization thanBitcoin, more security of
Bitcoin, significantly lessenergy use, but the
programmability of ethereum. Butbesides the programmability of
ethereum, with a secure sense inmind, you can audit it and have
it be secure and not lose abunch of money in the smart
contracts. And so we think chiais really something special to
leave. So, you know, we are, youknow, doing a lot of stuff with
(38:49):
the storage vendors. So we kindof forgot the cover this is my
job is I run the head ofstorage. So I basically work
with all the storage vendorswork with the ecosystem on proof
of space and time. So people arecreating products around
plotting and farming, you know,I'm trying to talk to them and
let them know what's up and whatpeople are doing with chia. But
(39:10):
it's a lot of fun. And, youknow, we have a bunch of deep
dives in the in the next comingweeks on hard drives. I've
learned quite a bit about harddrives over the last 20 years my
backgrounds in SSD. So I'veobviously been an SSD expert
I've been working in that spacefor over a decade. But I'm
actually learning a ton abouthard drives that I didn't know
over the last year at year justfrom working with harddrive
(39:31):
vendors. So we've actuallywritten up a couple blog posts
that we're really posting heresoon on. You know how to monitor
smart and hard drives and how totell if hard drives fails and
just cool stuff for people thatare like now using this using
the drives to be helpful forthem on their journey. The End
Userfor chia or the target. You know
people who will be running likefull nodes could be anybody but
(39:51):
at this point, I feel like theDYI community is huge. Then I
also see design miners havevideo content creators who are
massive storage which is lyingaround, that needs to be reused,
like all that unused storage orreusing the storage or some for
this purpose. And all they haveto do is click buttons and just
(40:14):
download the, like a UI thatsits on their on their computer.
I think that those are, I feellike are the target folks for
chia. And of course the peoplewho are proponents of
decentralization, in itsearnest, not just the dissent,
decentralization sort of, withwith centralization underneath,
(40:35):
so am I correct? In myassessment? Or like, is it? I'm
kind of off there?
Yeah, the, you know, right now,I feel like we have a big a big
chunk of the early adopters, youknow, with, like, 300 - 400,000
farmers on the network, we'vegot a big chunk of the DIY, and,
you know, early adopters andwant to participate in this.
(40:57):
We'd like to get more and Ithink, you know, to get to like
a million farm, you know, we'reasking those questions on the
roadmap of like, you know, whatwill it take to get to a million
farmers, what will it take toget to 2 million farmers? Well,
the software needs to be a wholelot easier. Plots need to be way
cheaper, and we're working onsolving all those problems, the
software needs to be like muchbetter, you know, the software
still, you know, I think the GUIis pretty good for, you know,
(41:17):
what, what it was for the kindof initial launch and we've made
some improvements. In the lastcouple of weeks, we released a
light wallet that doesn'trequire syncing the full node to
basically be able to sendtransactions. So there has been
a lot of improvements. But youknow, we know that we need to
get from like a million to 2million, you kind of need those
kind of like mobile friendlyapps you need. You need a bunch
of consumer stuff, you need tomake it really easy. So one of
(41:40):
the things I'll be working on isworking with like the NAS
vendors on making the pluginsmuch easier. You know, for like
a Synology, or like a Qnap NASto basically run a Chia farm in
the background it for peoplethat already have these hard
drives laying around and thosemarkets for NAS consumer, NAS is
huge. So we know that there's aton of people out there that
have these systems that arelaying around and storage, a lot
(42:01):
of people are buying morestorage than they need. We have
a bunch of data that suggeststhat people are only utilizing
about 30% of their externalstorage devices, like their
actual hard drives, whichbasically means they have 70% of
these devices free. And that'sperfect target for us for CHIA
farming.
And so yeah, the education needsto be there. And I feel like you
(42:21):
know, your site like chiadecentral, and couple of others
are doing a great job. And bythe way, folks, I'm not getting
paid by anybody to say that Ijust really love this project
and like this project. And sothis is that's why I reached out
to JM also and talk and to otherfolks as well. So it's a great
resource to start like a primerto it and like step by step, you
(42:45):
know, the digestible contentthere is great for any newbie
and anybody who's in the stage,any stage of like say CHIA
plotting and farming. With thatGM, I think we are out of time
and I know you have a you know,we both have to get back to our
daily work. And this was afantastic intro to plotting and
(43:08):
farming by you. I would love tohave you more on the show. When
you know when you're not supersuperduper busy with all the
other things you're doing. Thiswas fantastic. Thank you been on
the show and I would love tohave you back. Yeah, thanks
again tarun and you know ifanybody wants to ask questions
(43:29):
about plotting and farming, youknow, we're super active on
keybase is where all the chiastuff goes down you can find a
link on chia dotnet and youknow, we're all in there
answering questions on plottingand farming. You can find any of
us that work at chia I justwe're on there all day anyways
for work. So we're prettyresponsive and transparent about
when people want help. We'rehuge community of plotting and
(43:51):
farming people to help and haveany other questions about just .
Were there it's been a lot offun discussion about people
excited about the project.
That's kind of the magic of chiais that hard drives are really
(00:03):
power efficient be a reallyexciting part about chia is you
don't need some like fancy highend equipment to, you know, be
partaking in the network. Allyou need is a hard drive and a
desktop and you just go on yourmerry way. When the media was
very sensationalizing aboutearly on in their life oh my
god, you know, chia will wearout your consumer SSD in like 10
days. funny Bram and I wroteextensively on this topic so
(00:25):
infuriating because there arethese things called Data Center
SSDs is you can buy them used oneBay for $100 bucks or $200
bucks that have 10s of petabytesof, of write endurance where you
can write to before it wears outsidebar proof of steak proof of
steak sucks, true believers andproof of steak won't tell you
that. But that's why these proofof steak systems don't have 10s
of 1000s or hundreds of 1000s ofvalidators.
(00:46):
John, I would say you're wrong.
Vitalik is our God. Hahaha. Hey,guys, today I have the
opportunity to interview JohnMichaels. He's the VP of storage
at Chia. Before I take you tothe interview, I just want to
clarify that this podcast seriesis a passion project of mine and
my buddy Matt, which we startedout of curiosity. I believe
(01:09):
we've been very fortunate tomeet all our crypto heroes talk
with them been an amazingjourney so far. Also, thank you
everyone for their support. Itkeeps me going. Alright, without
any further adieu, let's nowhear from John.
(01:40):
I spent the last 10 years atIntel as a product manager for
the data center, NVMe SSDs. AtIntel, I joined chin in may,
which was pretty wild. But Iactually was participating in
the chia right right around theend of alpha, kind of like the
middle of 2020 like June Juneish, which is kind of funny, I
(02:01):
thought I thought more peoplefrom the storage industry would
be interested in you know, acrypto based on storage. You
know, what I saw was founded byBram Cohen. I was obviously a
longtime a BitTorrent user, andthen the college dorm room. So I
was certainly drawn into it. Andso, you know, I kind of helped
out and join the community, justas a big farmer, you know, I was
helping out on writing the wikisfor plotting and farming and
(02:24):
helping people out with SSDs. Inthe beginning, the plotters, you
know, it's funny now that theplotting is, you know, hundreds
of times if, you know, basicallymore efficient than it was, you
know, in the alpha, and, youknow, 10s of times more
efficient than it was kind of atthe beginning of the main net
launch. So, but yeah, that wasmore a lot of the what my
background and expertise in SSDskind of helped out the team
(02:46):
early when they were developingthe plotters.
Great, so John, by the way. Sowhat is, first of all, what does
mining look like in chia? Andwhat is plotting that you just
mentioned? And I've also, forthe sake of our audience, I'm
(03:07):
saying there's plotting andfarming. So if you can sort of,
decipher the two of these termsthat are specific to to project
Yeah, mining is a bad word itchia. We don't we don't like the
word mining. And it seems kindof ridiculous at first saying
like, Okay, why did we inventall this new terminology for
(03:28):
farming and plotting, but reallyis it's a brand new consensus.
So I think most of you guys mayknow, within a chia that we use
something called Proof of spaceand time, which is basically
using an allocated harddrivespace and you're using that to
secure the network. And you'reusing this as opposed to using
like CPU or hashing resources,like you do in proof of work.
(03:48):
And there's something kind ofmagical about this, this
farming, which is so so one, thewhole idea of like, why this
needed to be invented was weneeded a more energy conscious
model for cryptocurrencies thatdidn't sacrifice on security.
So, you know, there's a lot oftalk about proof of stake. And
I'm sure we'll go there at somepoint today, because it's hard.
(04:08):
It's hard to talk aboutconsensus and crypto without
talking about, you know, theother competing consensus
mechanisms, but a lot of proofof stake is touted as kind of
this energy efficientalternative to proof of work,
but, you know, they've beentalking about it, especially
etherium, you know, since 2014.
And yet to have actually shippedit there are there are many,
obviously, you know, you know,chains that are shipping proof
(04:30):
of stake, but it doesn't comewith all the trade offs and
people those are kind ofoverlooked. So in chia, you
know, go back to, you know,again, we don't we don't call it
mining, we call it you know,farming, and the other word we
use and chia is plotting, whichis kind of the act of creating
these plots, you're basicallyinitializing the proofs of space
into this compact form. Now alla plot is is a file that sits on
(04:51):
the hard drive. And once youcreate these files, you
basically just sequentially copythem over to harddrive where
they basically just sit, you canthink of these plot files, kind
of like bingo cards, where thethe network, in this case,
there's this perfect time, whichis the VDF or verifiable delay
function that basically call outa challenge. And a farmer
(05:12):
basically checks the plot ontheir hard drive to see if one
is supposed to challenge. And inevery interval, which we call
signage point, if you basicallyhave a proof of space that is
better than than the one thatwas challenged, then you can
respond to the network, you canmake the next block, and you get
your Chia as reward. So thisincentivizes people to
basically, you know, participatein putting their hard drive
(05:34):
space up to the network. And sothere's just one time thing we
have to do plotting, which isbasically create the files. Once
they're done, they basicallyjust sit on the hard drive,
mostly idle. And that's kind ofthe magic of chia is that hard
drives are really powerefficient. And obviously, SSDs
are even more power efficient,but they're a little bit more
expensive, per per gigabyte. Butonce your plots are on the hard
(05:55):
drive, the hard drive basicallyjust sits there idle. And then
the person who has the harddrive space can basically earn
rewards for farming. And theycan do this in a pool. And I'll
talk a little bit about if wewant to talk about, you know why
the chia pooling protocol isvery sophisticated and good, but
that the really exciting partabout chia is you don't need
some like fancy high endequipment to you know, be
(06:15):
partake in the network, all youneed is a hard drive and a
desktop and you just go on yourmerry way, there's even people
that are doing their farming onlike a Raspberry Pi 4
So talk about a little bit aboutplotting. And so from what I
understood, plotting is itoccupies some space on your
(06:35):
disk. It's similar to like,proof of work what you do in
Bitcoin. So these are basicallycryptography, cryptographic
proofs, I believe that justoccupy space on your desk, once
you you kind of create a plotright? Or stand correctly. Yeah,
it'sin for those who want to go into
(06:56):
the nitty gritty, you know, wehave a what's called a proof of
space construction document,that's part of our consensus
that kind of goes into how theseare, are made. But some of the
magic of why Chia works is someof the cryptographic and
mathematical breakthroughs. Oneof those was the verifiable
delay function, which were thefirst to ship in the actual
(07:16):
production system. And the otherthat proof of time but the
others is proof of space. Soit's Bram invented is this nice,
proof of space format, where youhave these cryptographic hashes,
and you lay them out in thesecertain tables. And then once
you lay out all this randomdata, you basically take that
data and you sort it and thencompress it. And this is
algorithmic compression, intonice, neat, compact format, so
(07:38):
that it can't be manipulated.
And this process this plottingprocess is this this is CPU and
you know, storage intensive, asfar as like iops and disk drives
and stuff like that. But oncethat's done, they never need to
do it again, for that file, thefile just gets created this 108
gigabyte file, and then it justsits there, and you can just
(07:59):
copy it over to whatever,whatever the cheapest possible
storage medium is, which todayis hard drives. So the fun part
of plotting is this is kind oflike the fun part where you
know, where I come into myexpertise, necessities and
background and data centersystems is the goal of plotting
is to try to make as many plotsas you can on a given system.
(08:20):
And the fun of it is there'sthere's now three different
community community plotters,besides the plotter that we ship
with. And so now there's tons ofdifferent ways and system
combinations where you can dothis plotting where you have
different amounts of DRAM andtemporary SSD and CPU cores. And
there's not really a one sizefits all solution to this, this
is kind of a fun computationalproblem, because now you're
(08:42):
trying to say, hey, how do wemake these plots as fast as
possible? In begininng of chia,that was really, really
important, because, you know,the net space was extremely
small, and the difficulty waslow. And it was a kind of an
arms race to get all the storageplotted. But now, now that the
network is over 40 exabytes, youknow, it's not really a huge
race to get on the platform.
(09:04):
So okay, so the plottingoccupies space on a hard drive,
and it probably on an average,how much does it take to create
a plot andfarm so in chia, you have
farming, which you basicallyhave your plots that live on the
hard drive, right. The plottingis just this act of creating the
plots and you don't need, youknow, hard drive we can most
(09:26):
people are using for plotting,they're using an SSD as a
temporary storage because SSDsare much faster than hard
drives, of course, but you canyou can plot directly to hard
drive, it's just much muchslower. And people prefer to
plot it like data center SSDsthat have high endurance. You
can also if you have a lot ofDRAM plot completely in memory.
And this is the fastest way toplot but obviously the most
expensive because you know DRAMis much more expensive than SSDs
(09:49):
or hard drives.
So more plots means more chanceof winning. It's almost like a
bingo card like more cards youhave like you increase your
chances of winning probabilityof winning, it's not a sure shot
in in blockchain world like itshouldn't be. That's how it's
designed. So it increases yourprobability. So more plots you
(10:11):
have, and more space.
Maybe it's good thing to stepback on, in chia, we have this
thing called the net space. Andthis is our representation of
all the storage that's out onthe network. And this is very
similar to hash rate in likeBitcoin or etherium, or any
proof of work chains. The netspace is the total amount of
capacity out there. Now, yourprobability of winning is
(10:33):
directly proportional to yourcapacity that you're farming,
which have all the sum of allthe plots that you have,
basically, divided by the totalnetspace. And so it's very
similar to hash rate in thatregards where the more storage
you have, the higher chance youhave of winning. And this is
where the economics get reallyvery interesting and different
(10:53):
compared to like proof of workwhere in proof of work, you're
basically trading a massiveamount of electricity. For the
resource, obviously, like minersand graphics cards are
expensive, but they also consumea tremendous amount of power,
hard drives, really the majorityof the cost is harddrive, once
you have the data copiedharddrive, it sits there idle
(11:13):
about five watts, and you know,this is pretty significant
difference between like, youknow, say like an ant miner
that's at three kilowatts, or3300 Watts, you know, versus a
five watt harddrive, it istotally different. So, that's,
that's really, the exciting partabout chia is that the economics
of how the incentives work, nowthat you have the harddrive
(11:33):
space where to keep the storageonline, it actually requires a
very low amount of power, youknow, compared to proof of work.
Alright, so that's great. That'sgreat. John, a Chia has been
compared to Bitcoin, of course,obviously, because of the
consensus mechanism it borrowsfrom Bitcoin, and also, you
know, other things that has doneon top of it, which are, you
(11:55):
know, I would say improvementson it on the proof of work, and
consensus or Nakamoto.
consensus. So you mentionedenergy usage. And, you know,
sometimes I hear these proof ofstake, folks talk about oh,
well, proof of stake solvesthat. Over proof of work, but
does it really? And so that's myfirst question. And the second
(12:17):
question is, you know, thenthere is a talk about, hey,
proof of stake uses, you know,no energy or some something like
that. But, you know, if youthink about it, everything uses
energy, right? Nothing is forfree. And this, you know, laws
of physics, thermodynamics,whatever you want to call it. So
yeah, so those two questions Ihave, like, I'll stop there.
(12:41):
Yeah, it's pretty funny. Youknow, Chris Dixon, Twitter
posted something on Twitter,like the other day, about, you
know, reposting something thatSolana had posted, they posted
something on their website aboutthe cost per transaction of
Solana. So this is kind of asilly metric, right, you just
basically take the annual energyconsumption of the network and
you divided by the total amountof transactions that your your
(13:04):
network could support. And thenyou have a theoretical lower
bounds on like what thetransaction, energy per
transaction is, and I'll say,will lead up to kind of why
that's kind of a little bitmisleading, where proof of stake
it definitely is lower energyconsumption than everything out
there. It's a proof of work, youknow, the energy thing is not
being blown out of the water, itis absolute disaster. You know,
(13:28):
Bitcoin, you know, the CambridgeBitcoin electricity study. And
then I used the economist askind of the sources, but you
know, it goes anywhere from like130 to 180 terawatt hours per
year of electricity use. The allthe data centers in the world,
you know, are a little over 200terawatt hours. So just to
compare Bitcoin versus that it'slike kind of equivalent. That
(13:48):
doesn't sound very good, right?
So obviously, proof of work hasenergy problems. And so proof of
stake it does solve the energyproblem, right. But if you only
have 1000, or 2000, validatorselectricity consumption, the
network is absurdly easy tocalculate you to say you
calculate the number ofvalidators. And in this case,
when I say validator, I mean, anactual physical system now in
ethereum two eth-2 a validatoris like every 32 eth, that
(14:11):
you're validating to thenetwork, or staking to the
network, but like, you can havemultiple those on the same
system. And that's kind ofdisingenuous, I think, right? A
validator, I think, is anindependent entity who has
running a system. And no, so tocalculate the energy use of
proof of stake, it's reallyeasy. You just add up the number
of validators that have physicalsystems, you kind of profile
what that system looks like. Andthen you look at the energy
(14:32):
utilization. And, you know, sumit up, and then look at what
that consumes over the course ofa year for the annual energy
consumption. So that's very low,right? If you only have 1000
validators at that's not verymuch energy. It's just 1000
servers. It's not it's not atremendous amount of energy,
sorry to interrupt. So when youcompare that with say, 400,000
plus validators, which chiacurrently has, if I'm not
(14:55):
mistaken or nodes, spread acrossand compare that apples To
apples or any other project. Andso, you know, it'll be
interesting to see what thosenumbers are. Yeah. And
so you can't compare. You can'tcompare power utilization
without comparing security. Andright if you if you think about
like, okay, the market. Now youknow that Ethereum and it's
(15:16):
number two and Bitcoin is numberone cryptocurrency. So the
market believes that proof ofwork is the most secure
protocol, just as defined by themarket cap of the top two coins,
right? The market believes thatproof of work is the most
secure. And that's where all themoney is going today. And you
can kind of let the market votefor how these things work. Now,
when you're comparing, you know,say, you know, I'll get to we've
(15:40):
done, obviously, a tremendousamount of work on, you know, the
chia energy consumption, that'spart of my day job. But I'll get
to there in a sec, when you lookat like, in a proof of stake
network, you know, you're havinga massive trade off for this
system that consumes low energy,but you're saying instead of
physical systems that people aregoing to basically buy to secure
(16:00):
the network and put real energyor work in proof of work to
basically secure the network,you're saying, well, they're
gonna put their money at stake.
And obviously, that has somemassive trade offs, where it's
much more challenging to reachconsensus, and they have lots of
ways to solve this problem. Andthen each one of them, or each
one of the solutions, basicallycomes comes with its own set of
(16:20):
problems. I love basically, Bramdid a talk at Stanford a couple
years ago on chia, and he had akind of an introduction. And one
of the slides that he has iscalled the sidebar proof of
stake, proof of stake sucks. Andthen he has three slides of
basically go on to talk about,like, how terrible proof of
stake is, and all the trade offsthat people are ignoring, as far
(16:40):
as security and slashing andbonding, and the nothing at
stake problem and all thesenuances of like, like, you know,
in in proof of stake, you needthis thing called weak. So weak
subjectivity where you basicallyneed to trust some validators in
where the Chia its Nakamotoconsensus, you basically just
look at any peer and decide whohas the longest chain, you trust
(17:00):
the longest chain, there's no,you know, if you were offline,
for a while you come back, youdon't need like a trusted set of
validators appears, you justcompute peer to peer network,
get a bunch of peers, and thenfigure out which was the longest
chain and you trust that one.
And that's the beauty ofNakamoto consensus. And so when
you're looking at, again, proofof stake, of course, it has low
(17:24):
energy consumption, becauseyou're trading off the security
as far and they won't tell youpeople that are true believers.
And proof of stake won't tellyou that. But that's why these
proof of stake systems don'thave 10s of 1000s, or hundreds
of 1000s of validators, theyhave, you know, single digit
hundreds, or, you know, maybe1000 Couple 1000 validators,
it's almost impossible. Becauseof all these problems, you have
(17:47):
to have a professional validatorthat has the right security
model that understands how to dothe staking, because if you
don't, the coins get slashed.
And slashing means they takeaway all your stake, that's not
good. So you really have to beprofessional to do this stuff.
Whereas in chia, you know, ifyou put up your hard drive to
the network, it's no big deal.
You know, you anybody canbasically do it.
(18:10):
John, I would say you're wrong.
Vitalik is our God. Andvery, very sad. I did, I did
have to read some very oldVitalik blog posts on my
research and proof of stake, youknow, which dated back to like,
2014, which is funny, becauselike, they've been talking about
this stuff forever. Our joke islike, you know, when is eth 2
gonna finally ship? It's like,you know, it's one of those
(18:31):
things. It'scoming. It's coming. Next year,
every, every year. Alright, sothat's fantastic. You know, so
Yeah, another point to yoursecurity point that you just
made is, and a lot of folks inIndia also when I talk to them,
they say, oh, you know, scaling,scaling, and I'm like, dude,
scaling is not the issue here.
(18:53):
It's the security is the numberone issue. And to me, Gene, Gene
brought this point home. He hada statement. the other day, I
think I was listening to histalks. And he said, If you go to
like the top CEOs, or go tobanks and all these companies
and tell them, please implementthis blockchain, but it's gonna
(19:17):
have like, it's gonna have thesmart contract bugs, every well
bugs, every software has bugs,but still, like it's gonna lose
money every two months, threemonths, four months. And what do
you what do you think is goingto be the CEOs reaction of this
big bank? And of course, theywant something that's much much,
(19:38):
much more secure, or likelightyears secure than what's
existing, right?. So that partis often overlooked in the
consumer mindset or the marketspeculators, which like, oh,
scalability, let's jump there.
Like, what about security? Yeah.
And back to that originalquestion you asked me which was
like, what is the energyconsumption of chia We wrote up
(20:01):
our model at Chia power dot org,that's the model I have, it's
pretty easy. Basically just lookat the net space, the total
amount of storage out there inthe world that is allocating
their space to the network. Andthen you basically profile what
a different set of farmers lookslike as far as what kind of hard
drives are using what kind ofsystems are using. And then you
make estimations on the kind ofbounded range of the energy
(20:22):
consumption of those individualhard drives. And then you sum
that all up. And you know, rightnow we're at about point three
terawatt hours of electricityconsumption on the chia network,
which again, is massively higherthan proof of stake, but it is
600 times less than Bitcoin. Sowhat we have is what we think of
really a good sweet spot wherewe have, of course, we have real
(20:43):
physical assets that are securein the network in this case, in
chia right now, there's, youknow, speaking as like the end
of November, there's about 40exabytes of storage on the
network and the net space. Andthat has about a billion dollars
worth of storage. So it's realcapex secure in the network. And
not only that is it's, you know,the security, basically, in
Nakamoto consensus, you need 51%to do you know, these attack,
(21:06):
well, to get 51% of thatstorage, now, you need to go buy
20x bytes, which has a, youknow, a, you need an entire data
center space worth entire datacenter worth of space, you need,
you know, half a billiondollars, and you need about a
year lead time to go pull thatoff. So, even already, you know,
just less than a year into thisChia mainnet, you know, we feel
like we're in a pretty goodspace for network security. The
(21:28):
other thing, because it's soeasy to be a farmer, all you
need is a hard drive in adesktop. You know, we have
anywhere from like, 300 to400,000 nodes in the network.
And so this is just, you know,again, we're, you know, 400 400
times larger than most of theseproof of stake networks, as far
as number of independentvalidators in our network, we
call them farmers.
Cool. You know, just to put outthere, disclaimer, I am a Chia
(21:53):
project fan. And so,particularly because of this
reason that you mentioned, andit for me, this statement sums
up that, you know, underpromise, under promise and
overdeliver is is what I've seenchia engineers do time, and
again, and I am not gonnatotally completely put those eth
(22:17):
guys under the bus. I mean, theycan worship their god, my God is
better technology chops andtechnical folks. So, you know, I
leave it at that, you know, Ifeel like playing a part in the
ecosystem, like being a nodevalidator or a person running
(22:37):
full node. I feel like, youknow, it's like an empowering
thing for the for the, forsomebody who wants to take part
in this new blockchainecosystem. For those folks, is
it easy to get set up, say, youknow, on their regular desktops
and old computers? to just getstarted? Start with the farming
(23:02):
process or plotting process?
Yeah, absolutely. So where do westart? You know, the only really
unique requirement about chiaplotting is it's, there's a lot
of disk rights, which, you know,the media was very
sensationalizing about early onin the right Oh, my God, you
know, chia will wear out yourconsumer SSD in like 10 days,
(23:23):
and funny, Bram and I wroteextensively on this topic so
infuriating because you thereare these things called Data
Center SSD is you can buy themuse on eBay for 100 bucks or 200
bucks, that have 10s ofpetabytes of write endurance
where you can write to before itwears out. So in chia, it's
very, what we recommend topeople to get to plotting if
(23:44):
they go pick up kind of a useddatacenter SSD to start or, you
know, kind of a high TBW, that'sterabytes written is how SSDs
are measured in endurance. Butyou have to start now, if you're
only plotting, like, you know,couple hard drives, now, that
doesn't matter, just usewhatever SSD you have laying
around. But if you're going tobe serious in planning, like
hundreds of terabytes, then nowyou kind of need some kind of
(24:05):
dedicated SSD for plotting. Now,the plotting performance is
basically how fast you make theplots is based on the amount of
CPU cores, you have the DRAM andthen you need this kind of fast
temporary SSD storage. And themore those you have, the faster
plots you have. So that's reallya question of like, like if
you're filling up a couple harddrives, it doesn't really matter
(24:26):
don't go do not go out and buydedicated you know, quitter for
this just use what you havelaying around to there's no
options, people do this, likeplotting as a service or cloud
plotting where you can, if youhave fast enough internet, you
can pay like a very littleamount. Yeah, it was very high
in the beginning of the network,because, you know, obviously
there was a lot of competition,people could price these very
high but you know, I expect theprice to basically download a
(24:48):
plot over time to get basicallyvery close to like what the
actual energy consumption is.
And so if you don't have likeall these, you know, high end
system laying around forplotting, you want to feel the
drive. That's it. So selectingan SSD is something we've been
kind of spending a lot of timewith what I spend a lot of time
trying to educate people on isdoing with bram bram had this
funny Twitter post, which waslike, you know, basically like,
(25:10):
you wouldn't take a nonstick panand you know, clean it with a
steel wall and then be like,Hey, I don't know what happened
to this is weird, it got ruinedyou basically selecting the
wrong tool for the job like,yes, there, there are many tools
out there that exists. If youuse like a low end, crappy
consumer SSD, that, you know,these are made for, like read
heavy workloads. Most people,you know, these SSDs again,
(25:33):
included with these like four or$500 laptops, you know, these
aren't like super high end SSD.
This is just like kind ofcrappy, low end NAND. And you
know that they're just meant tobe kind of power efficient and
low cost, right, these SSDs are40 bucks, 30 bucks are included
in some of these low end laptopslike those are not going to be
suitable for for Chia plots. Butthere are plenty of options for
(25:57):
if people want to get superserious about chia and learn
more there. We have a ton ofwikis and how to guides. There's
a ton of information on the webabout like, where to start.
That's fantastic. I also go toChia decentral. I think I really
like that because it breaks downfor me. In fact, you know, a lot
of folks in my friend circle whowere interested in the project,
(26:18):
and they're like, oh, yeah, youknow, what, where can I get
started? And I was kind of sickof like, telling them to be
honest, like how to do this,because I have to like babysit
them. And then I'm like, here'sthe link, I this, this place
here goes step by step and talksabout it. And they know what
they're doing. So, so yeah, thatthat couple of sites like was
(26:40):
Chia decentral. And they're abunch of other sites that do
that. I felt like chia decentraldid a great job at like,
breaking it down step by stepfor, you know, little challenge
folks. And folks like me,I appreciate that. I know for
the for the folks listening, youknow, before I joined chia, my
friend and I started this blogcalled chia decentral. And I
write, I wrote all aboutplotting and farming. And really
(27:02):
early I had these like, basichow to guides on plotting, and
you know, that we would justblew up in March, April, like
earlier this year, like ourwebsite, just like completely
blew up. And then obviously,now, you know, I don't have as
much time to write for thewebsite, because I'm actually
working on the Chia website. Andyou know, when I post, like,
very long, long form blog posts,and I'm usually posting the chia
(27:25):
dotnet. But you know, we stillhave a YouTube for chia
decentral, it's up. And we talka little bit about plotting and
farming and just random techstuff I'm interested in which
funny, so it's really a tarun.
And I have this you know, mutualfriend, I was just at the Open
Compute Global Summit, which isjust like hardware event, you
know, there's like Facebook andMicrosoft and Intel, you guys,
(27:48):
these guys are there at thishardware event. And I ran into
Summit Puri, who's the CEO andco founder of Liquid. And I
remember early in the day,somebody on the keybase was
like, oh, has anybody and theyposted this video, the Linus
tech tips, you know, review ofthe liquid honey badger for, you
know, and somebody said, Hey,somebody has anybody tested
(28:10):
plotting on this, what I foundout that that person was Tarun.
And we're actually going to makethat happen. I'm going to talk
to him about getting my hands onone of these things, we can do
some fun benchmarking stuff onon the liquid system for chia.
That will be sweet, I would needsome of those plots. Wow. Okay.
That's amazing. Yeah, I'm gladthat you will make that happen.
(28:35):
And I've also heard quite a lotabout these Mad Max plotters,
John, Michael, it's, I actuallyhaven't got into it. But could
you talk a little bit more aboutit? I know, you have like a
complete session on YouTubeabout it a couple of sessions
about it.
I'll give it a quick you know,so for now, now, we're getting
(28:57):
down into the weeds of forpeople for the chia enthusiast
people that want to look intoit. So there are, you know,
there was the plotter, which isa member of the the chia
plotting is creating these filesthat we shipped the original,
you know, chia software with itwasn't very multi threaded or
pipeline, right, we've reallyfocused on getting the
(29:18):
cryptography right and canmaking it actually scale and
work as far as like producingreliable plots. And this guy
named goes by Madmax. I thinkhis real name is Hugo, basically
develop this pipeline to chiaplotter that basically multi
threaded a bit a ton of thephases for the chip plotting,
remember the chip plotting youwrite out, this random data and
(29:40):
then you sort it, that's whereall the disk writes happen, and
then you compress it. And sothese happen in different
phases, but basically the Madmaxplotter you know we're plotting
used to take like, you know, 12to 14 hours for a single plot.
The Mad Max plotter now whenlike a pretty high end system
can produce a plot like say 10to 15 minutes and I got an
average desktop can produce aplot between 20 and 40 minutes
(30:03):
is kind of the average time formost people's desktops right
now.
So, GM, here's the thing that Ioften get also, like people
folks are interested in thisproject. And to them.
Decentralization matters a lotlike all this, you know,
stories, or the narrative that'sbeen told to us, like a
(30:26):
decentralization is better, it'smore resilient. It's all of
that, and a lot of people buyinto that. But then they also go
into projects, which are kind ofhave this hidden centralization.
And so, you know, I think forme, the cases like, why should I
run this? Why should I createplots? Why should I farm,
(30:49):
because if I believe indecentralized world, I'm
contributing in my own way tothis. And with the expectation
that, you know, if I have plots,I'm not always going to win. So
I think it's for the folks outthere that want to enable that,
right. It's like, similar to theelectric car enthusiasts who
(31:14):
first wanted that electric car,it was discontinued by GM. And
then, you know, Tesla camealong, and they wanted that. So
just wanted to put it out there.
Like when people have thesequestions like, Oh, should I
just buy right away? Yeah, goahead, buy it, if you want. But
this is an additional thing,which is kind of makes you a
(31:34):
part of this whole blockchaininternet community. Anyways, so
my rant is over.
Love it , we make running a fullnode pretty easy. You know,
right now, the database is,let's say, 10s of gigabytes, you
know, it's kind of in like 20 to30 gigabyte range, if it's
(31:55):
compressed, you know, so that'snot terrible. You just basically
kind of look at whatever desktopyou have. And basically, to run
a full node, it's very lightrequirements. Like, if you
looked into the requirements forlike running into ethereum, full
node right now, your mind wouldexplode. Like, it's so bad.
Like, and it's funny me sayingthat I used to run an ethereum,
full node in 2017. And you couldrun a full copy of geth. And it
(32:17):
wasn't that bad. But these theseother chains have just like,
that's the one thing Bitcoingot, right, which was like, you
know, we make make sure runninga full node is easy, because if
decentralization matters, thenyou can't have it like 900 steps
and have super high end systemrequirements for running a full
node. If you want lots ofvalidators. If you want lots of
participants in the network forsecurity, you need to make it
(32:39):
super easy. The other thing isfunny this guy, you know, in,
yeah, of course, Twitterbattles, like I need to stay off
Twitter, because I really shouldnot be like me to argue, argue
with trolls, but like somebodywho's like, well, you know, we
call that I think one of these,you know, proof of stake
networks for only having 1000validators, and they're like,
Well, isn't 1000 validators,better than 12 mining pools, and
(33:00):
I said, how we solve thatproblem and chia, because if
you're in a pool, we have thisthing called the pooling
protocol, which is all done onchain, where the pool basically,
the participants of the pool ofthe farmers make their own
blocks. And the way it works isyou that that pool can play has
about 20 blocks to basicallyclaim that reward. And then the
farmer gets 1/8 of the farmingrewards, and then the pool gets
(33:22):
the remaining and then it'sdistributed most the pool, but
the farmer is the one actuallymaking the blocks, you don't
actually give up anydecentralization by pooling, and
now you smooth out the rewardsfor people that have only have a
small amount of capacity, rewardthem the network, now they don't
have to have some trade off. Andthis is the trade off, like the
people's arguments about, youknow, basically proof of stake
(33:43):
being centralized, because, youknow, basically promotes these
professional validators, and youknow, you want to do you don't
want to delegate to somesomebody that doesn't know what
they're doing. And it basicallygets it to the point where the
exchanges have all the moneybecause in proof of stake,
basically, your stake is theamount of money or the amount of
coins you have proportional tothe network. So it ends up being
(34:03):
these, you know, these big,large institutions, and these
exchanges end up being thepeople that have control over
the entire network. And thencome proof of work. People argue
that all these mining, you know,these these entities that
produce the mining equipment andhave these massive pools create
the centralization around pools,and that's definitely correct,
right. You know, we saw likewhen a China crackdown happened,
(34:25):
he went 50% Drop in hash rate inBitcoin. So there's definitely
like a large amount ofcentralization and pools based
on people who have access tothese to the latest and
greatest, you know, mininghardware. And so, yeah, chia has
really solved this problem andsaying, like, Okay, we want to
have our cake and eat it too. Wewant decentralization, and we
want people to be able to docool things. We want people to
(34:46):
be able to earn small amount ofrewards, but there's pooling
also incentivizes people with asmall amount of storage to join
the network. And, you know, it'snot like either rewards right
now are anywhere between like $1and $3 per terabyte. per month,
depending on how much storageyou have, which may not seem
like a lot to some people, butif you had the storage laying
(35:07):
around, it was underutilizedresource, if you had just two
hard drives sitting in yourshelf, or stack hard drives that
were just doing nothing, now youcan basically monetize those.
And that's precisely what a lotof people have done over the
last couple months as annetspace has kind of been
hovering around the same pricehas been kind of now what we
believe what I believe to bereaching kind of some some
(35:28):
equilibrium, but what we'll seewhat happens in future,
also, you know, it's also great,do it yourself kind of endeavor,
you know, in my personalexperience, you know, I had done
engineering long time ago, I hadforgotten a lot of things and,
you know, then setting up yourown just buying stuff, like from
from, from eBay, or like otherstuff and just playing around
(35:51):
with it. I think this is, it's agreat way to even understand and
and, you know, I know, peoplehad mentioned earlier, this
reminded them of like, the earlydays of Bitcoin when everybody
could run a full load. And so I,for me, it was like a great
learning experience. And I'mstill learning that there are so
many things to, you know, justhaving a J BOD, or like all
(36:16):
these, you know, how do you dothe storage properly? How do you
maintain it, and the actual,like utilization, like
electricity costs, and for mehas been just stable it it
wasn't that massive, even thoughI have like a very small farm.
But yeah, so the DYI part isalso where in countries like
India is also kind of going awaywith, you know, everybody's just
(36:38):
watching tick tock videos allday long. So that
I mean that exactly. And thatwas part of what was rewarding
about you know, we did Chiadecentral, in the beginning, I
was writing these guides, I'dhave all these people reaching
out to me, like, oh my god, I'ma Windows only guy and I finally
installed Ubuntu server and ISSH in and I felt like Linux
God. Like, it's so funny.
They're like, you know, thesepeople are just like, it's so
(36:59):
rewarding to hear that peopleyou know, into Chia have taken
it on as learning experience tobasically get better at system
administration and storage andunderstanding your computer
systems and building. It's a lotof fun to, like I mentioned, you
know, part of the fun is justlike, you know, getting these
parts off eBay, buildingsystems, benchmarking, comparing
versus others, that's kind of alot of the fun of the community.
(37:21):
You know, the early communitywas really based off the
plotting and farming communityas as we grow, chia and you
know, we didn't talk a lot abouttoday about all the other
awesome stuff that chia isdoing. I know you have had other
other chia folks on the podcastlike Bram and Gene, of course.
But you know, we are actualparticipation in developer
(37:41):
ecosystem and, you know, amountof apps that are being developed
on top of chia is now goingcrazy. And starting to ramp up,
we just released their chiaasset tokens a couple of weeks
ago. And there's already a bunchof a couple meme coins at
launch. And people are makinggames there's like Mojo dice,
which you can like, do this likegambling on chia. Now, there's
all these like, things poppingup. And this is just what
(38:03):
happens. It takes a long time.
You know, once the ecosystemstarts, it's really the core
technological community that aredoing the development. And at
now, you'll start to seedevelopers and other people
start rolling in to reallyuncover the magic of what makes
Chia so special. You know, thisthe coinset model, we pick,
again, very similar to Bitcoins,UTXO model, we believe has like
(38:25):
the more decentralization thanBitcoin, more security of
Bitcoin, significantly lessenergy use, but the
programmability of ethereum. Butbesides the programmability of
ethereum, with a secure sense inmind, you can audit it and have
it be secure and not lose abunch of money in the smart
contracts. And so we think chiais really something special to
leave. So, you know, we are, youknow, doing a lot of stuff with
(38:49):
the storage vendors. So we kindof forgot the cover this is my
job is I run the head ofstorage. So I basically work
with all the storage vendorswork with the ecosystem on proof
of space and time. So people arecreating products around
plotting and farming, you know,I'm trying to talk to them and
let them know what's up and whatpeople are doing with chia. But
(39:10):
it's a lot of fun. And, youknow, we have a bunch of deep
dives in the in the next comingweeks on hard drives. I've
learned quite a bit about harddrives over the last 20 years my
backgrounds in SSD. So I'veobviously been an SSD expert
I've been working in that spacefor over a decade. But I'm
actually learning a ton abouthard drives that I didn't know
over the last year at year justfrom working with harddrive
(39:31):
vendors. So we've actuallywritten up a couple blog posts
that we're really posting heresoon on. You know how to monitor
smart and hard drives and how totell if hard drives fails and
just cool stuff for people thatare like now using this using
the drives to be helpful forthem on their journey. The End
Userfor chia or the target. You know
people who will be running likefull nodes could be anybody but
(39:51):
at this point, I feel like theDYI community is huge. Then I
also see design miners havevideo content creators who are
massive storage which is lyingaround, that needs to be reused,
like all that unused storage orreusing the storage or some for
this purpose. And all they haveto do is click buttons and just
(40:14):
download the, like a UI thatsits on their on their computer.
I think that those are, I feellike are the target folks for
chia. And of course the peoplewho are proponents of
decentralization, in itsearnest, not just the dissent,
decentralization sort of, withwith centralization underneath,
(40:35):
so am I correct? In myassessment? Or like, is it? I'm
kind of off there?
Yeah, the, you know, right now,I feel like we have a big a big
chunk of the early adopters, youknow, with, like, 300 - 400,000
farmers on the network, we'vegot a big chunk of the DIY, and,
you know, early adopters andwant to participate in this.
(40:57):
We'd like to get more and Ithink, you know, to get to like
a million farm, you know, we'reasking those questions on the
roadmap of like, you know, whatwill it take to get to a million
farmers, what will it take toget to 2 million farmers? Well,
the software needs to be a wholelot easier. Plots need to be way
cheaper, and we're working onsolving all those problems, the
software needs to be like muchbetter, you know, the software
still, you know, I think the GUIis pretty good for, you know,
(41:17):
what, what it was for the kindof initial launch and we've made
some improvements. In the lastcouple of weeks, we released a
light wallet that doesn'trequire syncing the full node to
basically be able to sendtransactions. So there has been
a lot of improvements. But youknow, we know that we need to
get from like a million to 2million, you kind of need those
kind of like mobile friendlyapps you need. You need a bunch
of consumer stuff, you need tomake it really easy. So one of
(41:40):
the things I'll be working on isworking with like the NAS
vendors on making the pluginsmuch easier. You know, for like
a Synology, or like a Qnap NASto basically run a Chia farm in
the background it for peoplethat already have these hard
drives laying around and thosemarkets for NAS consumer, NAS is
huge. So we know that there's aton of people out there that
have these systems that arelaying around and storage, a lot
(42:01):
of people are buying morestorage than they need. We have
a bunch of data that suggeststhat people are only utilizing
about 30% of their externalstorage devices, like their
actual hard drives, whichbasically means they have 70% of
these devices free. And that'sperfect target for us for CHIA
farming.
And so yeah, the education needsto be there. And I feel like you
(42:21):
know, your site like chiadecentral, and couple of others
are doing a great job. And bythe way, folks, I'm not getting
paid by anybody to say that Ijust really love this project
and like this project. And sothis is that's why I reached out
to JM also and talk and to otherfolks as well. So it's a great
resource to start like a primerto it and like step by step, you
(42:45):
know, the digestible contentthere is great for any newbie
and anybody who's in the stage,any stage of like say CHIA
plotting and farming. With thatGM, I think we are out of time
and I know you have a you know,we both have to get back to our
daily work. And this was afantastic intro to plotting and
(43:08):
farming by you. I would love tohave you more on the show. When
you know when you're not supersuperduper busy with all the
other things you're doing. Thiswas fantastic. Thank you been on
the show and I would love tohave you back. Yeah, thanks
again tarun and you know ifanybody wants to ask questions
(43:29):
about plotting and farming, youknow, we're super active on
keybase is where all the chiastuff goes down you can find a
link on chia dotnet and youknow, we're all in there
answering questions on plottingand farming. You can find any of
us that work at chia I justwe're on there all day anyways
for work. So we're prettyresponsive and transparent about
when people want help. We'rehuge community of plotting and
(43:51):
farming people to help and haveany other questions about just .
Were there it's been a lot offun discussion about people
excited about the project.
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