Growth Update
That might have been the fastest 7 days of my life. Each Sunday, I open up my notes to review last week’s Netspace growth numbers, and for the 3rd straight week I had to double check that only 7 days passed. 395 PiB up from 295 PiB last week. 33.8% growth.
Take a look at the unique address count chart. Not only have we hit 5,000 unique addresses with XCH (congrats space farmers!) but the slope of the line is increasing which means new nodes are responsible for a larger and larger portion of the Netspace.
If this growth rate continues, Chia will approach 10,000 unique addresses shortly after transactions unlock.
Take a minute and appreciate the chance to watch the most secure and decentralized blockchain unfold in real time.
NUC Build Update
@storage_jm updated his wildly popular NUC Build Guide this weekend to reflect the plotting improvements in 1.0.4. Check it out if you have a NUC and want to squeeze another parallel plot out of your system.
Chia Community
The Chia team has built an incredible community. Helpful, self moderated and reinvigorating a collection of tinkerers and builders. If you’ve spent even a few minutes in the Keybase channels, you know what I’m talking about.
One person in our clubhouse on Sunday spoke about building a plotter with his nephew. They are trouble-shooing linux, farming drives, and getting the chance to bond over building something together. This isn’t a one off story. Everyday we hear from the community about how Chia feels like the old days of the internet. IRC Channels, torrents, building a computer. The interest and excitement around running a full node is a visceral experience. We’d love to feature any of these stories, so please reach out at [email protected] if you have something you’d like to share with the community.
Son-of-a-tech featured a great “WTF is Chia?” Youtube video to his 105,000+ subscribers on Saturday. He clearly researched Chia extensively and asked a lot of great questions that he’ll explore in upcoming videos. Give him a subscribe and watch his Chia farming rig grow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smgVRXsBbio
I love this post from reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/mtvama/junk_rig_got_lucky/ This is what Chia is all about, sure there’s a mad dash for plotting and drive capacity but give me this kind of story every day.
Continue helping each other, self moderating and leading the conversation. We have the chance to build a wonderful, inclusive community that is magnitudes larger than we already are today.
Chia in the News
Tom’s Hardware posted an article speculating that a new cryptocurrency could cause a SSD and Hard Drive shortage that is getting some traction.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hard-drive-ssd-shortages-imminent-if-new-cryptocurrency-blooms
People new to Chia don’t quite grasp how big and mature the SSD and HDD market is. 1.2 Zettabytes of hard drives are projected to ship in 2021. The Chia netspace would need to eclipse 12 EB of brand new hard drives to take even a 1% share of this market. That total does not include the likely large over-provisioned hard drive space that is already out there which we expect will find its way to Chia once a coin price is set.
Yes, there may be some temporary supply chain shortage as run-rate inventory is snatched up and yes, people may incorrectly use a consumer grade, low TBW SSD for temp storage. However, in the scope of the entire Drive market that ships 100’s of million of units a year, Chia farming will likely only make up a tiny percentage of this spend. A hard drive isn’t a single purpose piece of hardware. They have utility outside of farming Chia. Storage requirements continue to increase every year, so at worst you’re paying a premium for something you can use for 5+ years. The “write once, read many” workload on the drives is such a low workload that it won’t hurt the expected lifespan.
That’s all I have for this week. With the rate that news is coming in and how fast the netspace is growing, I am not making any predictions about what we will see this week. I look forward to connecting with you all on Keybase, Twitter and Reddit.
Make sure to check out our friends at www.chiaexplorer.com, www.chiaforum.com, Coin Breakthrough Youtube, and our Chia Power consumption model at chiapower.org.
Stay Curious and Happy Farming!
I think people are looking for any reason to jump on crypto with everyone being so bitter over GPUs. it’s not like this didn’t happen 2017, lol. almost exactly point for point. the GPU I am using at this moment went from $250 to $1200 to $100 in the space of 6 months back then, and it’s $600 now basically it seems like.
anyway I’m going to set up some of my drives seems like a fun project that isnt nanopool
Great post as always!
Good stuff
I want functionality that plays the “Ch-ch-cha Chia!” song clip when we farm a block :-)