Scaleway and Chia
In a nutshell, to actually get Chia coins, you need a Proof of Space. The more storage you own, the higher your odds of getting a Proof of Space, the more Chia coins you can make.
While Chia was originally meant to take advantage of unused storage space in your laptop, things are now getting out of hand. Farmers are acquiring all the storage available in the market to improve their chances of getting coins, and thus actual money.
Even though Chia is supposed to be “greener” than bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies based on Proof of Work (needing highly energy demanding computing resources), its network now represents a total of seven thousand Petabytes globally.
If you consider that one HDD is on average 8TB, Chia, as of today, consumes close to one million hard drives in the world. One million hard drives powered on, based on speculation, the price of a Chia coin.
As you can imagine, the HDD supply market is deeply impacted by this behavior, leading to price increases and extremely long, and out of control, lead times. Not to mention the pandemic that already had a significant impact on the price of components, and lead times. At some point, everyone will be impacted, as equipment prices are growing, from individuals buying a hard drive to store photos, to companies actually using the cloud to create backups or as a key asset for their business.
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