New cryptocurrency Chia blamed for hard drive shortages
A new cryptocurrency is being blamed for shortages of hard drives and other storage systems, as speculatorsbuy up critical components in anticipation of a price rise.
Chia is the creation of Bram Cohen, the entrepreneur behind the BitTorrent file-sharing system. It aims to improve on more popular cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum by removing the incentives to burn massive amounts of electricity.
But Chia’s replacement for bitcoin’s energy-intensive “proof of work” system, called “proof of space and time”, instead requires users to devote massive amounts of hard drive space to generating and storing random numbers, with rewards doled out to those with the most space used up. That, plus the skyrocketing value of the cryptocurrency, has led to huge demand for the specific types of hard drive that work best with the system.
Most affected have been large hard drives, which are used to store the random numbers, and a specific type of solid-state drive (SSD) called an NVMe drive, which is used to generate the random numbers. Prices for both types of drive have noticeably gone up in the past week, according to David Gerard, a cryptocurrency expert and author of Libra Shrugged. The problem is particularly acute for SSDs, which have a limited number of uses before they break.
