TECH TALK
Goodbye Mining, Hello Farming
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT the cryptocurrency-induced PC component shortages couldn’t get any worse, there’s a new coin in town: chia. Try to ignore the catchy “ch-ch-ch-chia” jingle in your brain and focus on the looming prospect of a cryptocoin that does to storage what ethereum has done to the graphics card market. By the time you read this, it’s entirely possible the storage shortage (stortage?) will be well under way.
Jarred Walton
Chia coin officially went live on March 19, but the coin didn’t start publicly trading on crypto exchanges until May 3. From a slow burn for the first few weeks, the amount of storage space required for the network (called netspace) ballooned from around 214PB to over 3.6EB—that’s exabytes, or 3,984,588.8 terabytes. I shudder to think about how much netspace will be allocated to chia by the time you read this, given the current rate of increase.