Inferior endurance is the "dirty secret" of the consumer-level SSD industry. You and I know better, but the average consumer doesn't pay attention to write endurance or under-provisioning.
While I'm no proponent of storage mining, I do feel a little empathy. First they sell products that don't stand up as well to wear, then they wash their hands of it when you actually want to use the thing. Feels a bit like when stainless steel appliances gave way to plastic ones.
That's why I stopped buying entry-level, and prefer enterprise SSD's or at least good brands that publish endurance figures and have held up to third-party testing proving them out.
Here are some fun experiments writing to SSD's for days/months/years on end to see how long they'd last:
I have no problem with a manufacturer publishing a lifetime write rating and denying the warranty once you've exceeded it. But unless they were up-front about it, amending the terms afterward by saying "well, we never intended you to use it like that" seems a cop-out.
Consumer 100Mbps internet will also not match datacenter 100Mbps internet. Consumer coffee maker wont match industrial coffee maker when you try to make coffee continuously, it will overheat the sensor area and start making bad coffee and eventually fail much sooner than the industrial one.
It all comes to the use case scenarios. It's not really a dirty secret but cost issue where you can pay up more for robustness and buy the industrial use one if the consumer grade stuff doesn't fit your needs. On 99.99% of its users it's fine, almost everyone is happy with a consumer SSD.
I’m down with a consumer coffee maker not working as well as an industrial coffee maker, but 100Mbps is a well defined thing, and I don’t understand how it isn’t criminal that my internet speeds never even approach the advertised rates. This isn’t an issue of my “use case” not requiring honesty, this is an issue of me paying for something and simply not getting it.
The big difference between the consumer and the industrial grade product of the same specs is usually in the guarantee of reaching those specs consistently, and in more extreme conditions.
A consumer laptop screen might do just well in the dashboard of a car but it might also turn yellow. You can't complain because it wasn't meant to be used like that (like operating in 80+C temperatures). Your vacuum cleaner would certainly not last long if you started vacuuming water and construction debris, the kind of stuff an industrial vacuum is built for.
A consumer SSD is not designed to be used for this kind of mining. Regular consumers are more price sensitive and ignore other aspects because they're not tech educated. Many don't even understand what this "mining" entails, just that they could make some money. There's a minority of consumers who went for the cheap stuff and now want to make money off of it by pushing it beyond the stated limits. I honestly don't think they have a leg to stand on.
It's a good thing that not all products are made to meet all expectations because they would cost all the money, all the time.
> There's a minority of consumers who went for the cheap stuff and now want to make money off of it by pushing it beyond the stated limits.
Wasn't the GP's whole point that those limits aren't stated? Or that they are deliberately misleading, e.g. consumer internet sold as "up to 10 Gbps", but would more accurately be labeled "10 Gbps once in a blue moon".
I wonder how often that is the case (the limits not being stated).
I've looked a bit for an nvme drive for an older computer, so I wasn't looking for the absolute best performance, but rather larger capacity and better endurance for a low price. And all the reviews I have seen had rated endurance numbers.
I've just had a look at WD Blue drives [0], and the spec sheet is easily accessible on their site and gives the endurance in GB written, not some timeframe based on an unknown "normal daily usage".
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[0] I've chosen WD specifically because of the recent shady PMR / SMR drives.
So, all we have to do is defeat regulatory capture, and then we can have meaningful advertised speeds. That also might first require getting money out of politics.
If you’re in the US, fortunately, Larry Lessig has been working on fixing both of these issues so we can have meaningful advertised internet speeds:
This is why the law is there. In many countries the advertised speed has to be within a certain range of the average, or hit that speed a certain percent of the time. So 800-900Mbps average, or hitting 1Gbps 60% of the time could very well fit a "1Gbps connection" tier from a legal perspective.
This is why ISPs advertise "up to" a certain speed and then go on to detail the exact conditions in the terms.
It's ironic OP doesn't complain about SSDs never reaching the theoretical and advertised interface speed. Which is no different from internet speeds not reaching the network interface speed as many others here call an example of being cheated. SSD endurance is far better described than it's performance for the average consumer: warranty expires after "this much" data written in "this much" time.
> It's ironic OP doesn't complain about SSDs never reaching the theoretical and advertised interface speed. Which is no different from internet speeds not reaching the network interface speed as many others here call an example of being cheated.
This comparison is not exact. I haven't seen SSD manufacturers advertise transfer speeds of the interface. They say they support this interface, but the transfer numbers advertised are different. Whether those actually happen is a different story.
In the case of internet connections, they don't usually advertise the "interface speed" either. They advertise actual bandwidth[0]. Yes, nowadays, a lot of providers will advertise 1 Gbps connectivity, which coincides with the interface speeds with which people are familiar. But for example, in my case, advertised speed is 400 Mbps. Over a PON (passive optical network). My transceiver (optical interface) will support much more than that. I've never had a 400 Mbps network interface in my computers. Should I expect them to give me 1Gbps? Turns out, they usually do, but I guess that's more of an exception than the rule.
The issue is when a provider will advertise say 400 Mbps, like in my case, but in practice I'm never able to reach more than say 40 Mbps. In this case, yes, there may be some kind of law based on which this behavior is "lawful" or not.
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[0] Which may be "wire" bandwidth, as opposed to "useful data" bandwidth, so they'll happily count encapsulation, etc, but I'd argue that's somewhat different, although still scummy.
> This comparison is not exact. I haven't seen SSD manufacturers advertise transfer speeds of the interface.
I went to the first consumer grade SSD manufacturer I could think of, Corsair, and lo and behold, the description of the SSD advertises the interface speed [0] as "up to"
1,950MB/s write and 4,700MB/s read.
I get the feeling we might understand the term interface differently. What do you take it to be? To me, the interface is PCI-Express 4.0 4x. The "1950 MB/s write and 4700 MB/s read" are the specifics of the drive's performance.
According to Wikipedia, PCIE 4.0 4x can sustain more than the spec sheet advertises [0].
The spec sheet advertises 4700 MB/s write and 1950 MB/s read. The interface can handle more than 7000 MB/s in each direction. That's more than twice the advertised bandwidth of this drive.
If what you mean is that the MP600 isn't able to handle the claimed 4700 MB/s "most of the time" or something, than that's fair (I have no idea if that's the case or not). But the "interface" doesn't really come into play, here. The drive is advertised as PCIE 4.0 4x because the 3.0 revision couldn't handle the advertised maximum read specs.
Just like it would seem strange for an internet provider to sell a 400 Mbps (advertised) connection over a 100 Mbps line.
It's not only about the bandwidth but other factors like latency between regions etc.
Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting.
The moment you have guarantees on the speed, your prices and speeds are adjusted to make it feasible(the same hypothetical ISP can have 2 customers at 100Mbps, 30 at 10Mbps and 500 at 1Mbps with guaranteed speeds and vastly different prices). In many places you can definitely pay a lot of money and have a connection that is not pooled with your neighbour.
It's the same difference as with the shared hosting and a dedicated machine hosting.
> the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time
Consumers should be free to violate any and all assumptions with no negative consequences. Especially unstated ones that only people familiar with their business model would know about.
If an ISP advertises 1 gigabit/second internet, consumers should be able to fill that pipe with 1 gigabit of data every second. In practice only a minority is going to do that but it should be possible with no punitive throttling of bandwidth whatsoever.
The one caveat is that today all ISPs advertise their plans as "up to" a certain speed very prominently in all marketing material. It's no even fine print or byline. The "fair usage" clause is the kind of thing that's buried deep to hide that they may employ throttling.
Think of a "service" you provide. If your employer was expecting you to deliver peak performance 8h per day, 5 days per week, for the rest of your employment with no exception, would you still accept the salary you get now, or would ask an order of magnitude more? It's just that your employment contract and law introduce some "fine print" to allow downtime, and the chance to make mistakes or run at lower efficiency with no (immediate) termination.
Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for?
Firstly you are comparing performance guarantee of a person vs a router. Secondly employment law is a different from consumer law. It's a separate can of worms, with specific clauses for discrimination, etc.
The reason this is important is to limit fraudulent claims, if my business is selling a 1 GB/s internet connection that actually only reaches the speed once a month, and someone is selling 1 GB/s internet connection that works reliably, our marketing material and contract might look the same. I would be defrauding the consumer and my competitor.
I am comparing 2 situations where laws set the framework and contracts specify the relevant details within that framework. The contract or terms of use usually contain the exact definition of the service and the conditions it's offered in, and the SLAs. So I'm not entirely sure how these being "different" changes anything for the purpose of the discussion. The contract sets some terms within the framework set by the law. This is valid whether it's a router or a person. The only thing you could point at is that the marketing material is misleading. But...
GP's claim was based on the same misunderstanding you make now regarding that marketing material:
> if my business is selling a 1 GB/s internet connection
You're doubling down on the same mistaken assumption. I randomly browsed over ISP websites just now and they all sell "up to xGbps" connections. Marketing material anyway can't cover the breadth and scope of an actual contract. So it's the job of the law to decide what "up to x" can mean (you deliver that speed at least 60% of the time for example), and for the terms for the specifics of that particular contract.
Just because we don't like something doesn't mean they're breaking the law or that there's a moral obligation on one side to satisfy all claims for the other.
No marketing material is 100% accurate because you can't cram all the things that need to be said in one punchline. But if you enter an agreement based on that one marketing claim then surely the problem isn't with the provider.
>"contract or terms of use usually contain the exact definition of the service and the conditions it's offered in, and the SLAs"
I would love to see this fantasy world - I have been with 5 different residential broadband providers in the past 8 years, not a single contract contains SLAs nor do they give any indication of how their speeds or latency stack up in practice. Calling the Virgin Media customer line does not produce any usefull information either, and their sales staff cannot answer basic questions.
Even worshippers of 'mah free market' should be able to see the problem: I was looking for the best provider money can buy, and I ended up stuck in year-long contracts with companies that actually provide a crap service, because the only way to know is trial and error. My money should have gone to the best company instead.
>"Just because we don't like something doesn't mean they're breaking the law or that there's a moral obligation"
I think we have a moral obligation not to defraud others. Casually I define it as misleading people into parting with their money or causing them to suffer losses. To me that includes selling herbal cures that you know are fake, homeopathy, or inviting people to a restaurant telling them you'd pay and then taking off as the tab arrives. None of these activities are actually crimes.
There's no need for condescension especially in this case. I live in that fantasy world where I get exactly what I pay for. It's not a guarantee that every country has the same consumer friendly laws but even here it's perfectly acceptable to sell an "up to 1Gbps" connection that falls shy of the marketing.
> not a single contract contains SLAs
If they didn't it's because you chose to pay less for one that has no SLAs. I have a consumer and a business contract from the same provider at my home address. The consumer one offers higher speed for lower price but offers no guarantees except the legal baseline. The business connection on the other hand lists for example minimum, maximum, and "normal" speeds, clearly states that there is no data cap or throttling, and the SLA for restoring connectivity is within 8h, and more.
The only way for marketing material to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is to be the contract itself plus the relevant law. Anything else will be concealing some information.
> My money should have gone to the best company instead.
The problem is that you have a low limit for what you're willing to pay for, but a high limit on what you are asking for. It's a typical consumer education issue.
> I think we have a moral obligation not to defraud others.
Look, no offense but this is rant territory. You use your personal definition of "defrauding" to make the case that suits you best. Your SATA interface never actually reaches 6.0Gbps, your SSDs almost never reach the advertised speeds, your electricity isn't exactly 120/240V or exactly 50/60Hz. Your steak isn't exactly 200g. Your car doesn't consume exactly 7.9l/100km. and not all McDonalds chicken nuggets are the same size.
If it helps you understand the point, try to apply the same standards to yourself to see why guarantees cost.
Show me one marketing banner that you consider valid and let me nitpick. We'll either find out that no banner in the whole world is honest, or that you can nitpick anything.
"The problem is that you have a low limit for what you're willing to pay"
You are missing the point: money was never the problem. My current provider is miles better than my previous one, but you could not tell that by comparing contract or marketing material. So I could not select the best firm, so they lost out on business, so the market is not functioning as it should. You brough up SLA, I don't need an SLA for SLA's sake.
I think it is unfair to compare a different market entirely
>"your electricity isn't exactly 120/240V or exactly 50/60Hz"
Your residential internet provider can just throttle you willi-nilly.
On the contrary, electricity gris has to follow very strict rules, and if the voltage drops by half we call ot a brownout. The entire country comes to a halt and executives have to answer some tough questions.
Similarly car milage cones from tests inaccordance with specific methodology, they cant just slap a number that's wrong by a factor of 2 and call it a day, but Virgin Media can.
> On the contrary, electricity gris has to follow very strict rules
The electric grid is regulate as such, to define the acceptable ranges. ISPs are regulated differently but the law still defines acceptable ranges for their service. They either don't prohibit, or even explicitly allow saying "up to 1Gbps" while offering lower for example. If you find the practice bad look to change the law. Internet should be regulated like a utility.
You make a case for having a crappy ISP experience but not for them deceiving you because you bought an "up to 1Gbps" connection and get less than the upper bound. You could get some guarantees but you didn't want to pay. Most things you pay for deliver lower than the upper bound, by how much determines if it's fraud or not, depending on the law.
> car milage cones from tests inaccordance with specific methodology, they cant just slap a number that's wrong by a factor of 2 and call it a day
It's very ironic that until just now you insisted "the consumer is being defrauded with fraudulent claims" and now you justify equally unrealistic numbers in other scenarios like car fuel or pollution numbers (don't get me started on how they measure PHEV fuel efficiency, factor of 2 would be great). So you willingly accept equally fraudulent claims if they're obtained in an irrelevant standardized test. Do you really think Virgin Media couldn't pass a "standardized test" with flying colors? By your own admission it's no longer fraudulent because they did a speedtest against their own servers and it came out great.
How many times will you switch tracks like this and just throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks? It looks to me like your argumentation is very poorly thought out, and you wobble between conflicting ideas, or misunderstood ones. You moved the goal posts around so much neither of us knows where they'll pop up. I get you have a bad ISP but their problem isn't the marketing slogans unless you go for the most superficial of reasoning.
> The business connection on the other hand lists for example minimum, maximum, and "normal" speeds, clearly states that there is no data cap or throttling, and the SLA for restoring connectivity is within 8h, and more
What stops them from providing this information to consumers? They can just measure their network performance and provide these statistics.
> today all ISPs advertise their plans as "up to" a certain speed very prominently in all marketing materia
Where I live they don't.
> Why is the same so unacceptable when it comes to a product or service you pay for?
Because consumers deserve more protections in general. ISPs know exactly what they're doing, they shouldn't be able to mislead consumers by promising performance they can't deliver.
My friend, there are very few things that we can describe precisely, from a legal standpoint or even for technical specs. It's all about "ranges". And the higher the precision and the guarantee, the higher the price, or the converse. Which was my point, in case I couldn't manage to make it clear enough even when putting it next to something an average person could relate to. There's leeway built into any legal or technical framework and the contract terms should follow.
Your "precisely defined and measured" SATA3 6 Gbit/s interface never delivers the 6.000Gbps to you by design (8b/10b encoding). So are all SSDs and motherboards in breach? SSDs rarely hit any of the advertised speed. By comparison their endurance is defined far clearer for the consumer.
Whether it's an SSD or an internet connection they come with clear predefined conditions that are legal* and the customer agrees to. Everything else is high consumer expectations meeting low consumer willingness to pay, or even to understand the relationship.
*Of course there are plenty of illegal and abusive clauses but giving a stated 900Mbps average speed with a 1Gbps contract, or selling an SSD with stated low DWPD don't really fit that description.
> The one caveat is that today all ISPs advertise their plans as "up to" a certain speed very prominently in all marketing material.
I literally started how describing something as "up to" [ostensibly a range] is not outright misleading, if at all. It was also strictly speaking of marketing material and how well you can convey info in one banner.
Seems you're not a stranger of moving goalposts and dodging question. You're selectively arguing some of my points, while so elegantly avoiding others because "oh that's different". Which is a very immature way of pretending to have a meaningful conversation, and a good way of hinting you have no counter for that one.
You're doubling down on your misconceptions. Whatever "they" do it's because it's legal. And I'll be blunt: your definition of what is moral and what things should mean is irrelevant. If you want to be right at any cost you can just keep inventing personal definitions to apply to others but not to you because "that's different".
I made my point at quite some length. If that didn't do it, nothing will.
I think this is unrealistic. Very few consumers are going to have high utilization of their bandwidth. The connections are going to be mostly idle. It makes sense from an efficiency standpoint to then share that resource among more customers. That way you can bring down the price.
Look at the cost of business internet. It's guaranteed. If it says 100 Mbps then you're going to get it with effectively no interruptions. But you're also paying 5-10x more than a consumer connection, because the ISP can't resell some of that connection that you don't use.
> Very few consumers are going to have high utilization of their bandwidth. The connections are going to be mostly idle. It makes sense from an efficiency standpoint to then share that resource among more customers.
That's okay. What's not okay is suddenly punishing users who for some reason decided to use a lot of bandwidth because they were under the impression that they could.
all that may be true. but capturing reality and providing sales terms that reflect it is the responsibility of the seller. one that they have clearly abrogated in the interest of extracting more money from the market.
Sure, customers can do that. That's how you get quotas, fair usage limits, higher prices when the average usage pattern diverges from the intended use cases before the technology or infrastructure upgrades catch up.
Right, if they think customers need less then they can just advertise less. They shouldn't get the benefit of advertising a big number while providing a small number just because most customers can't tell. That will make it impossible to fairly compare them with their competitors.
>Also, the prices given for consumers assume that they are not going to max out the bandwidth all the time, so the ISP having 1000Gbps line to the rest of the internet can sell it to 1000 customers, giving them each a 10Mbps. It will work fine up until a lot of them are watching Netflix at the same time or torrenting.
I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling.
What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.
I've never heard or experienced anyone not getting their advertised speed (apart from DSL that varied depending on quality of the cables etc. or wireless services). There are indeed laws that guarantee that, depending on where you live.
But you can't really expect to max out 100/100 24/7 all year long on a consumer pipe. It is overprovisioned and assumes that most won't be utilizing theoretical maximum all the time. Just as the coffee maker.
Household internet speed are the maximum possible if at 2am nobody is downloading anything in whole building for example. Company pay for guaranteed bandwidth, and premium level troubleshooting from provider. The prices are astronomical.
My employer with 400 onsite employees (in noncovid situation) has provably worse transfer speed & latency than my household with our consumer 1 Gbps connection. I expect them to pay at least 100x more for it. But its a bank, they can't do differently - they never had connection issue in last 10 years I work there. If they ever had, the team of experts would have fixing it as their top priority.
We had a consumer-grade coffee machine at the office once, along with free coffee capsules for the employees.
Whereas in somebody's home that machine would have made 4-5 cups of coffee a day, that machine was making in the order of hundreds a day.
Of course it broke quite often.
But having worked at a restaurant as a waiter in my youth, I can tell: industrial (even entry-level) professional dish-, washer are on another league, completely different. If anything, for having the dishes done in 40 seconds (!)
While my next home dishwasher will be an industrial / commercial-grade dishwasher after one too many services calls for a supposedly premium residential make (Bosch, and I've heard rumblings Miele fares no better), I also have to acknowledge there are trade-offs.
1. I need to supply higher voltage and amperage than most homes plumb for dishwashers. Fortunately not three-phase for the smaller units I'm looking at.
2. I cannot put my more delicate dishware into them, and hand wash them.
3. While there is more energy and water use, I'm okay with that. That marginal inefficiency is more than made up for by keeping a residential dishwasher from entering the landfill in just a few years. Under residential use, I can reasonably expect to run it until parts run out, which for the better brands like Hobart, does not appear to happen for decades.
4. While I have to use detergents that are not available at the grocery store, I'm okay with that.
I sometimes wish there were open source reference blueprints for the big ticket household appliances built around a design dimension that will not change for the foreseeable future: human planiform scale. And manufacturers plug into that frame so the basic core like the tub of a laundry machine or dishwasher doesn't change common mounting points and dimensions while everything around it changes and swaps Ship of Theseus-style over the decades, radically reducing the footprint of these machines entering the waste stream. What I'm really wishing for is more cradle-to-cradle design however, and I should leave the actual implementation to the domain experts.
1: Demand that it's attached to the hot water (machine need less power to heat it up, less chalk...AND Cheaper(your boiler is better at producing hot water))
2: Clean it once a month, especially the pump intake (has often sand like stuff on the ground)
3: DONT use tabs but powder.
However, Industrial grade stuff is more expensive (from the power standpoint), but better for the water (not stupid aromas)
> 1: Demand that it's attached to the hot water (machine need less power to heat it up, less chalk...AND Cheaper(your boiler is better at producing hot water))
Most machines actually specify that the water entering the unit has to be at least 49C. To meet this you usually have to run the hot water on the kitchen sink—which then wastes water. (And may be where people get the mistaken idea for pre-washing: they're running the sink anyway.)
AFAICT, the only brand that can officially be connected to the cold water (10C) supply is Miele, which have an internal heater. And the official specs show that they actually use less overall power with cold water. This is probably because (a) some of the cycle can use cold water, and (b) a smaller quantity overall needs to be heated up compared to running the tap. It does take longer, time-wise (~30m), though; see page 45:
BSH says cold water is okay, warm water only up to 60 °C (!).
I'm under the impression most dishwashers follow pretty much the same design. There's an inlet valve, usually just the aqua-stop itself, which feeds into the water/ducting plate, which also acts as a heat-exchanger between waste water and water intake. Another two valves control the water softener (to switch between normal operation and regeneration using salt water, which is what the salt you put into it is for). Fresh water runs into the pump sump, which contains the waste water pump, which is controlled by a water level switch connected to the inlet (which also turns the aqua-stop off). The pump sump has a third connection, going into the pressure pump, followed by the water heater, that then goes to the washing arms. The water-clearness sensor (which is just a light barrier) is located in this path.
So overall there are remarkably few actuators and sensors:
- Three valves
- Two pumps
- One heater
- One solenoid to release the powder / tab latch
- Outlet temperature sensor at the heater
- Thermal cutoff integrated in the heater
- Water clarity sensor
- Level sensor
> Ever wonder how dishwashers work? Are you ever bummed by the performance of yours? Well, this video can answer your question and possibly provide you with a solution!
Since I have a parade of technicians coming through to fix the issue, I had the opportunity to talk with them. The high-end units of all brands these days have sensors everywhere to save water and energy, and simultaneously monitor cleaning effectiveness as they are all competing on advertising the least utilization with the most cleaning power (monitoring cleaning power and cleaning results is another aspect of saving water and energy). It reminds me of Apple's "you can never be thin enough" focus.
In my case, it has led to an issue that is still stumping the techs, where something is causing the unit to believe it has finished the session well before it even gets under way with the hot water cycle sometimes, and other times to not even start after the initial tub fill. The diagnostic code thrown indicate a malfunctioning sensor they've already replaced twice. Maybe if I call them out enough times, Bosch will just offer to replace the entire unit for me. While I don't get charged labor for subsequent tech visits for the same issue, I still pay for parts, so maybe Bosch's dastardly plan is I'll Ship of Theseus pay for a new unit part-by-part and end up paying 10X what a normal unit would cost before it works again.
In the meantime, it has been fascinating getting an inside look at the design decisions. Lots of incredibly clever engineering has gone into these beasties, which screams to me as a software guy of a ton of refinement over decades of accumulated experience, much of it learned the hard way in the field. Kind of like when I see a software system where the sharp edges have been burnished away into a smooth patina of refinement, and there are still odd bugs that pop up now and then.
AFAIK commercial dishwashers are very diverse: some are rugged equivalent of a consumer dishwasher, some can only sterilize pre-washed dishes, and some do the quick 40 seconds wash... but use really a ton of electricity.
Yes, for smaller cafe-style commercial establishments, I've seen the "ruggedized consumer" type models, but chatting with repair techs, I got the impression from them they feel those units are nearly as corner-cutted-into-not-BIFL as their consumer brethren. I did forget to mention that another tradeoff others might not be aware of is having to scrape off food before it enters these commercial units. I already do that.
My style of cooking is wash as I prep and cook, so I'm constantly in motion while prepping and cooking. I dynamically figure out ahead of time whether what I'm using at that moment is needed the rest of the session, and wash it the moment I get a "let simmer for N minutes" break, and everything that is dirty that doesn't land on the meal table lands in a sink of hot soapy water. I scrape for a compost pile as I go as well.
This minimizes clean up time and food waste at the end of the meal, but I have since found out few people do this. I learned it when I worked back of house. While I had dedicated team members for various clean and prep activities, there was still plenty to do with not a moment wasted, so building that habit was the only way to keep up with the service rush. Having just learned queuing theory gave me a leg up over a couple old salts who learned the same through brute force intuiting the habit, and I taught the less-experienced team members by giving them rote expert-system-like if-then procedure.
It was a glorious feeling when my entire shift team had only a few minutes of cleaning and tidying at the end of the shift well before the cleaning crew arrived (thank goodness we did not have draining and cleaning the fryer on our duty list), and we could relax a few minutes over a snack and shoot the breeze just before clocking out.
Our office has worked out that it's still cheaper to buy replacement consumer-grade applicances than one really expensive industrial-grade and pay for servicing and maintenance. It's really wasteful but made more financial sense.
The tests that you link to suggest that SSDs meet and exceed their manufacturer's durability claims as measures in petabytes written.
The problem appears to be that manufacturers want to translate that number into something consumers understand, and farmers now want to take them up on that for their industrial use of the devices.
Manufacturers use "lasts for 10 years" as the label for consumers. Which seems entirely reasonable - the disks really will last for 10 years in typical usage, and this phrasing seems useful for consumers.
Now we could fix by either requiring that any warranty standard must hold under any imaginable usage scenario, or manufacturers could resort to a somewhat squishy "reasonable use".
I think the "any use case" requirement is not practical, and we have a long history of "reasonable use" being used, eg for cars.
The problem here IMO is that "reasonable use" is a loophole that can be used to justify anything, or at least it doesn't tell the customer how to use the device before expecting trouble.
If the limitation was also expressed in objective, preferably quantitative terms, it would be clear. Internet conections usually have that: 1Tb transfer at 100Mb/s speed, then 64kb/s. 50% of the time, the speed may be limited by congestion, etc.
As long as "typical usage" fits reality and is not blatant lie like "serving size" on many cookies.
(lets say that there is package of snack that everyone eats at once - package label claims that it is expected to be not eaten at once, what allows them to make less horrifying nutrition label)
Part of the point of how I prescribed it is specifically that you can take X and divide by your own value of Y to get useful expected lifetime under more rapid writes.
> Inferior endurance is the "dirty secret" of the consumer-level SSD industry. You and I know better, but the average consumer doesn't pay attention to write endurance or under-provisioning.
Besides Sandforce SSDs I've never have had any SSD fail, including cheap SSDs with 300+ drive writes, which is an insane workload for anything consumer (in my case, being used as a scratch disk) -- you are literally writing dozens of terabytes to an SSD that only holds twohundred GB or so.
None of my normal-use SSDs approach any amount of wear like this, and despite some being used daily for almost ten years, they generally have less than 50 drive writes.
So I really don't see why any FUD is warranted here.
It was in a machine running Ubuntu and manifested in such a way, that during kernel update (linux-headers, i.e. writing lot of small files, to be more specific) it just gave up and became unresponsive until power cycle. It still did work during normal, user usage when the demand on it was light.
Bad analogy. In case of Toyota sport cars its the refinement you are paying for. There wont be much endurance difference between LFA vs RC, and especially against 20 year old tuned Supra mk4. Toyota had a bad habit of making bulletproof engines like 2jz or 1UZ-FE.
It's not really a secret. If you get a consumer KitchenAid mixer and use it for baking in an industrial kitchen, KitchenAid is probably going to reject your warranty when you send it in for a burned out motor after 6 months.
Warranties cover defects, not wear and tear far beyond the advertised workload.
If advertised duty cycles aren't a thing, then every SSD, printer, and paper shredder is breaking the law.
I'm not aware of anything in magnusson moss prohibiting you from indicating a devices designed workload-- whether it's pages shredded per minute, pages printed a month, or TBW / DWPD. It is well known that flash has a limited lifespan and no court is going to rule that burning through those cell writes with a commercial workload somehow entitles you to coverage under an implied warranty.
>Inferior endurance is the "dirty secret" of the consumer-level SSD industry. You and I know better, but the average consumer doesn't pay attention to write endurance or under-provisioning.
The hope is that capacity increases outrun the loss in endurance by changing the way the SSD is used. If you have a large capacity SSD the assumption is that you often just write a large file onto it once and it stays there for a long time, resulting in a net gain in endurance.
If you had the opposite, like an SSD cache integrated into an HDD where the cache is being overwritten all the time you run into a problem and your best choice would be to use a smaller capacity SLC SSD with more endurance.
Pretty easily solved imo by ending the warranty on the rated TB written (they all have ratings for this and they vary wildly - faster drives can have 1/10th the endurance of others) - in addition to the time limit.
I do have a problem with someone selling me a product and then telling me what I can and can't do with it.
I would think there is a write limit in the warranty.
If that is the case, it's more a question of whether the advertised lifetimes are dishonest marketing or not. I guess most people shopping the warranty would understand "years or write limit" well enough.
I would say they aren't telling you what you can do with it, they are just telling you what uses they will cover under warranty. In this case, it's likely that a legal requirement to cover the drives under warranty for this use would cause the price to go up or the product to be pulled.
Would Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe drive be considered consumer grade or enterprise? Also, are NVMe drives susceptible to faster degradation due to higher throughput?
> Also, are NVMe drives susceptible to faster degradation due to higher throughput
Only if you use the time saved to write more data than you would have with a slower drive. e.g. for 1TB both the 970 evo (nvme) and 870 evo (sata) are covered by warranty for 600 TBW.
The 883 DCT on the other hand offers 0.8 DWPD for 5 years or drive writes per day. So 5 * 365 * 0.8 = 1460TBW, or about 2.45x the consumer drive
>Only if you use the time saved to write more data than you would have with a slower drive
Well, NVMe SSDs do get quite hot due to much higher data transfer speeds, and higher temperatures lead to faster flash memory degradation, although I have no idea how important it is in practice (probably on the order of an SSD dying in 10 years instead of 20)
Consumer NVMe SSDs only get to those higher temperatures if you're writing a lot more data than a SATA SSD or hard drive could handle. And such higher temperatures might at a stretch have a meaningful impact on the data retention time for data currently stored in the SSD, but won't meaningfully shorten the program/erase cycle count.
Flash has (much) worse data retention at higher temperatures, but endurance actually increases with temperature. So the optimal way to handle flash memory is mildly hot when written to (to increase endurance), but stored cold (to increase retention).
Watch out for the fastest Samsung and WD drives. You want to find TB written (TBW) rating for the drive, which is in the specs but takes a little digging usually to find.
Consumer models will often have about 300-600 TBW of life. Data Center hardware designed for continuous use will have 1000-3000 and up.
Watch out for the FASTEST drives like Evo and WD Black, faster drives (PCIe 4.0, 7GB/sec read) can have much lower endurance.
as long as you're within the endurance limits the warranty should apply. writes are writes as far as the drive is concerned, it could be movies, it could be porn, it could be crypto, it doesn't matter, the warranty was advertised with a specific wear life and if you're within that the workload is irrelevant.
(writes when very full / etc will cause write amplification, but that still shows up on the endurance counter. if you want to do a bunch of writes with 10x amplification cause your drive is full then that's on you, it still counts 10x towards the endurance... but the endurance counter is what they specify in the warranty.)
if the drive fails when it's past its advertised endurance... they can tell you to pound sand and that's fine.
Reminds me of the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. An AI which destroys the universe by turning it into paperclips, as its goal is to make more paperclips.
First crypto took marginal GPU and energy capacity. Now it is taking SSDs.
It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks.
Of course crypto is not an AI so it can only get fed more resources if it converts believers to feed it more. More GPUs, more SSDs, more coal, to run calculations.
So this should be self limiting at some point. Or maybe I’m wrong and some practical use will come of it but it’s been 12 years without any so far.
Someone a while ago imagined a future humanity where we had constructed a Dyson shell entirely devoted to cryptocurrency generation and were now a species of conmen and zealots desperately trying to convince alien civilizations that it is valuable.
"But we spent all this energy to prove that the work done by our distributed mining networks could be trusted. It's trusted!
Aliens: "Um, so... yeah, we were more interested in trading novel technologies and refueling our ships. But seeing as you all look like you're starving to death and have destroyed your system's resources, how about we just donate a few universal constructors and a bunch of feed stock for them. We've got enough fuel to make it to Proxima Centauri, so we're good for now. Oh-- we're hard coding the universal constructors to "food" only though because your life choices have been... well never mind that, our philosophy is not to judge."
Uninvited additional aliens: “hey guys, sorry to interrupt, you should try protomolecule-chain. It solves the problem of boot-strapping an interstellar proof-of-work ledger. There’s some problems with inter dimensional dragon environmentalists, but that’s neither here nor there.”
Don't worry, long before then we'll pass the Crypo Event Horizon, when it becomes uneconomical to compute anything but crypto, and civilization will gratefully collapse. Our descendents will curse the blockchain and evolve other means for exchange of value.
Right now a non-trivial chunk of compute power, storage and engineering effort is spent on advertising and marketing. I'd rather take crypto, at least it's easier to ignore.
Bring back the gold standard, and enjoy your popcorn as the entire solar system rushes to build supermassive particle accelerators that bombard base metals with all sorts of stuff until they turn into gold. It really is the same principle as brute-forcing meaningless hashes until you get a predetermined prefix. Only in this case the desired prefix has 79 protons.
Ah yes-- I remember reading that around the time it was released and couldn't really wrap my head around was "economics 2.0" was actually supposed to be. 16 years later I'm starting to understand.
An intergalactic network of wormholes enables rapid travel and communication between worlds, but the collective energy output of the universe's stars is devoted entirely to bitcoin mining, ultimately accelerating the heat death of the universe.
Stars burn whether the energy they produce is used or not, so this doesn't accelerate the heat death of the universe. You'd have to merge stars for that (because larger, heavier stars have a higher rate of fusion).
Technically if you wanted to maximize energy production you would split every star apart into dwarf stars that lived 100s of billions of years. You don't want them burning at all. Then you would take their matter and dump it in a black hole and capture that energy.
Not to mention if you could get total conversion of mass to energy going, you could just scare all the stars into inert hydrogen icebergs and use the hydrogen to fuel your total conversion reactors. Much more efficient than fusion.
Another thought, an advanced bitcoin miner type thing uses new physics where the environmental destruction used to power it is basically to increase the progress of the Big Rip (perhaps only locally though), but maybe the reason we always thought expansion of space was always happening is because older aliens were already doing the same thing for their blockchains.
There is a practical use: evading China's currency controls. Buy mining hardware and electricity with renminbi. Sell the resulting coins in the free world for fiat hard currency.
> Buy mining hardware and electricity with renminbi. Sell the resulting coins in the free world for fiat hard currency.
That's the way it keeps getting described to me.
However, where does the hard currency come from? Who is providing the USD for ChiaCoin, and why?
This applies to any other of the cryptocurrencies that pop every day. Mining alone is about as useless as owning a printing press for your own currency $FOO. Unless someone is willing to give you hard currency for $FOO, it's just worthless strips of paper.
unfortunate souls who are speculating on it since they don't know better.
Also a huge % is probably held by a small amount of early adopters who whale that coin up so it seems more valuable and has more perceived trading traffic
> unfortunate souls who are speculating on it since they don't know better.
Yes, but its seems that every day, it's some other coin. At some point, the money has to run out.
> Also a huge % is probably held by a small amount of early adopters who whale that coin up so it seems more valuable and has more perceived trading traffic
That only applies to usefull things, like infrastructure and industry. When it comes to speculative s financial assets, oyr capacity to fund them is virtually unlimited
I don't think you can buy Chia yet. I hear people are using their spare storage space to farm it. I imaging lots of torrented movies have been sent to the recycle bin recently.
I’m in a machine learning telegram channel. There was one guy recently who came in to ask which new crypto is going to take off. I think there’re many people trying to find the next big thing. Most of them probably waste money.
China is not a singular monolithic entity though, and RMB -> USD conversion is heavily restricted, so both things can be true. The principle motivation for Chinese Bitcoin miners is to get USD/non-RMB fiat, while at the same time, the CCP doesn't crack down on Bitcoin mining as tacit approval of using Bitcoin as a long shot to dethrone USD globally.
Cool. But still, under this theory, should it become sufficiently clear crypto won’t dethrone USD, and crypto becomes enough of a way for wealth to leak out of China in a way that makes the CCP grumpy, would THAT predict a CCP clamp down on crypto? And if so, what might the thresholds and parameters be?
I was just about to say that. China has an economic system where it is politically feasible for the state to own significant assets and portion of the economic capital. The West doesn't, we have a (mostly neoliberal) system based heavily on finance and private ownership, and nationalization of assets is an impossible policy.
You can destabilize the finance system by creating free money, in fact, according to exogenous money theories, it was always possible to create money out of thin air. But until cca 1980s, the creation of new money was confined to financial institutions (not just government) and heavily regulated.
The regulation was gradually lost (that's why we are having these asset bubbles and financial crises), and Bitcoin democratized the money creation even more.
But regardless whether you believe or not that Bitcoin can destabilize financial system, ultimately, if things go south, China can actually react and pull the plug on the financial industry, limit its power in the economy at large, because it owns big chunk of it (or can make sure it owns it). In the West, however, this is a political issue, and governments can only watch the financial system fail and cause another big recession (or at least, huge misallocation of resources, for example in real estate).
So why would China care? Geopolitically, they have the upper hand. We should care, though!
> They endorse Bitcoin openly to their citizens as a good investment.
The Chinese government is not usually in the business of recommending specific investments. (However, they might discourage people from investing into known scams.)
Specifically, he said that stablecoins would have to subject themselves to the same strict regulations as banks if they want to become widely used payment channels, and that cryptocurrencies aren't per se currencies, but a different kind of investment, and that, like other countries, they're currently investigating how to regulate them to manage the associated risks.
How that turned into an "endorsement" I don't know for sure, but I suspect hype factories trying to sell bitcoin using whatever story works.
Okay so that’s a competing theory to the parent I was replying to, to be clear, though it does seem a better fit for available evidence to my unsophisticated self.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. If China wants bitcoin to succeed, they would do well to turn a blind eye to people evading currency controls, in order to maximize incentive for their citizens to mine and use it.
That makes sense, but it seems like an unstable temporary situation? If what you say is true there’s a tension- crypto can help unseat USD as the global reserve currency, but a huge part of crypto’s value is because... Chinese oligarchs can use it to transmute their renminbi into USD? What am I missing?
I'm on pretty shaky ground hypothesizing further, but if it were the case, they must believe whatever they cede through allowing the circumvention is worth the outcome. Would trading Chinese-mined BTC (on equipment largely produced in China) for USD necessarily be good for the dollar?
The value of Bitcoin comes from the fact it can provide strong property rights to anyone in the world.
There are many countries where the governments have failed to secure property rights appropriately, mismanage their currencies, embezzle public funds, and abuse their citizens in so many other ways. It's disgusting.
Citizens of those countries can opt-in and benefit from Bitcoin and security guarantees it provides.
Billions, quite literally billions, of such people live in such situation today. They have no economic security. No property rights. Even the land they live on gets confiscated every now and then.
....how is granting strong property rights to the less fortunate of the world is not one of the most valuable things in the world?
Bitcoin is a freedom technology, disguised as get-rich-quick scheme.
This is the best pro-bitcoin argument I’ve heard in a long time! One big question I have is why bitcoin specifically has the value and not other cryptocurrencies. Others provide the same technical security guarantees. Bitcoin has a lot of hash power, which is nice, but that doesn’t seem to provide much additional security compared to other major cryptos, especially if the government of China can ruin it at any time. Why not Etherium, which has a lot of additional useful features? Or some other crypto with lower fees and a higher transaction capacity? One that’s carbon-neutral? I buy that bitcoin is important (I do own some), but I don’t see why the value should go up, or that it should end up being worth a big proportion of the benefit that cryptocurrency brings to humanity.
1) it was launched fairly by a person who uniquely had no reasonable expectation of profit when doing so,
2) it was launched first, giving it first-mover advantage, and
3) its proprietors made the very wise choice from 2015-2017 of censoring their populist opponents pushing for Bitcoin to become PayPal 2.0, and instead euphemistically refering to Bitcoin as “digital gold” — the speculative store of value to end all speculative stores of value
The very fact you’ve asked this question in full knowledge of owning both BTC and altcoins whilst also alluding to altcoins being more valuable, and the fact readers can only possibly act on your narrative by investing in the coins to which you allude — obviously only as a speculative store of value — just goes to show why Bitcoin is #1. Cryptocurrencies are simply nothing more than speculative stores of value, there are no exceptions.
It doesn't provide any property rights? Well then, why don't you go ahead and help yourself with some billions in Bitcoin from Musk's personal holdings? Should be easy, according to you.
I think you'll find that it's much much easier to repossess a house, rather than repossess a bitcoin address with billions.
The mythical land where it is easy to safeguard crypto keys than physical properties while people still haven't learned to safeguard their passwords.
If the govt knows about your properties than they would also know about your digital activities as well.
Bitcoin is only freedom for the oppressors in this scenario since only they are allowed to move unchecked and will use it to get out when they realize their days in their country is numbered.
Personal theory: they're like juggling. Satisfying but ultimately useless.
Many clicker games are perpetually-changing resource-balancing and short-vs-long-term-tradeoff games under the hood. Do you spend your [_] on something linear and replace it soon, or exponential but you'll be waiting longer for the next thing? Do you spend [#] to support more passive styles, or do you go full [%] and spend 30m micro-optimizing by hand to save hours later?
That same kind of thing exists in the core of lots of games. E.g. look at StarCraft - Zergling rush, or get more resource gatherers? Early and mid game is super heavily focused on this, and the players and community spend incredible amounts of effort micro-optimize their setup to get even one more unit in a time window. Through this lens, the combat is primarily evidence of your superior resource management, and whether you investigated your opponent's plans well enough.
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They're of course not all homogeneous, but if I had to pick one thing they overwhelmingly share in common, it's this resource-balancing aspect. And they go a heck of a lot further in it than most other kinds of games do.
Censorship resistance. Digital money that does not require constant "authorizations" from incompetent, flaky, slow, or even sometimes corrupt payment processors or other financial entities. Money that works even where traditional systems fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for the underbanked. Send it truly anytime anywhere. No other system does this.
In other words, money created by people for the people.
> Money that works even where traditional systems fail.
Just playing devils advocate, but isn’t it’s usage reliant on traditional systems like electricity, ISPs, hardware makers, software makers, mining operations, etc?
Say you were in California during rolling blackouts, or Florida post hurricane that knocks the power out for weeks, or an authoritative country that has historically turned the internet off on its citizens during protests/uprisings. How would it all work?
Well, you need very little to use Bitcoin - basically, just internet access. And, potentially, you only need to smuggle as little as 250 bytes.
Banking systems has more choke points. If money is on your bank account and it gets blocked, that's it, nothing can be done about it.
With Bitcoin, even if internet in the entire country is blocked, you still have options: you can transmit data by phone. There are many ways to smuggle 250 bytes out of a country.
You can also just memorize the mnemonic phrase (so-called brainwallet) and move yourself out. They won't find your bitcoins even if they strip-search you. (But if they know you have them, wrench attack might work, no defense against that if your privacy is compromised.)
All the other things are not necessary for using cryptocurrency, they just need to happen somewhere. So the system can route around the damage. Mining is not possible in your country? That's OK, it will work as long as there's at least one country where mining is possible.
So Bitcoin resilience is not about working when power is out, obviously. It is about giving people options to route around the damage. If your bank blocks you, you can't go to another bank to get money on your account, since that money resides within a particular bank. But Bitcoin is global - you can access your funds from any computer in any country, as long as you have a private key.
Those banking systems are the primary method of turning fiat into bitcoin & vice versa, so those banking choke points are defacto choke points for bitcoin as well.
I believe cell towers in hurricane threatened places like Florida plan for generator backups and flood countermeasures etc. That said I'm sure throughput is squeezed, but I don't think anyone really plans for a catastrophic scenario where large numbers of US residents lose all internet.
Kind of like saying "what good is Bitcoin during a hurricane Katrina scenario" but by that point its survival, not money you're worried about.
Sure, but The point was how Bitcoin and crypto would “work” when traditional legacy systems fail.
Relying on HAM radios and satellite links are both legacy systems and we can’t pretend any significant percentage of the global populace could conduct Bitcoin transactions without centralized 3rd party services subject to the same regulations as the banks, much less use HAM radios, especially the poor and unbanked who always seem to be the goto demographic the proponents of cryptocurrency point to as the people benefiting greatly from cryptocurrency.
It’s on par with saying when supply chains fail we have farming, hunting and gathering. Very few people are capable of getting fresh water much less living off the fat of the land.
I like the technology and do see it as still in the early stages of adoption, but I liked the freedom of the early internet, unfortunately that didn’t stop SV and VC money from putting a strangle hold on it, making it the shit-hole sandboxes it is today, exploiting people and farming their attention and data for advertising dollars.
what's being transmitted is a signed transaction, they are not encrypted. They can be safely transmitted on a postcard.
You are correct in that technically HAM does not allow for encrypted communications, but that's not an issue here, and probably would be very low on the list of concerns in a situation where your only comms channel is HAM.
The US could shut bitcoin almost completely any time it wanted simply by saying that no US bank is allowed to deal with it, and no US bank is allowed to deal with any foreign bank that deals with it. On/Off ramps to actually buy things with bitcoin would dry up, and its lack of practical use as a day-to-day currency would mean it had practically no value. Legal business that tried to accept it would essentially have to become money launderers to do so.
It is not censorship resistant, the entire system could be censored. Heck, FinCEN is already moving forward with regulations that require regulatory reporting on crypto transactions touching US institutions in a similar way to CTR reports. Bitcoin exists only because it is not a threat to governmental monetary control, and could be squashed the moment that changes.
Because drugs were not a digital abstraction that required buyers & sellers to go through traditional financial institutions to convert their fiat cash into physical drugs.
Banning bitcoins as I described would mean the vast majority of all banks in the world would not be able to act as on/off ramps to crypto so it could never hit mainstream as a medium of exchange. It would also be worthless as a store of value because you wouldn't be able to get that value anywhere useful. It might live on as some part of the existing shadow banking networks, but it would never deliver on the promise of currency available to the masses & disconnected from arbitrary nation-state monetary policy.
I'd like to be clear in my viewpoint though: I am not anti-crypto. I think there are many improvements it can bring to the existing global financial infrastructure. I just don't have any faith that it can deliver on promises of freedom from government regulations & control. If it exists, it will always exist because of government forbearance in killing it, not despite government antipathy.
Because drugs is a commodity people want. There are numerous examples throughout history where different forms of currencies get shut down by the ruling body. There is of course an argument to be made about Bitcoin being a commodity. But I think we can easily agree that the consumer demand for Bitcoin isn’t going to rival that of drugs.
I think the real joker is the black market. Modern drug organisations are Apple sized businesses that also have their own enforcement of violence and justice systems, and so on, making them effective non-geographic states.
I live in Denmark, we’re a rather small country, we frankly have less authority behind the Danish Krone than some drug organisations would have behind whatever crypto currency they fancy.
Gonna go out on a limb here, no one prosecuting the war on drugs actually wanted to get rid of them, they just wanted to criminalize their political opponents.
While it's difficult to figure out what people's true motivations are, the promotion of new cryptocurrencies, the "get in early" rhetoric, leads me to believe most cryptocurrencies are little more than pyramid schemes. The ability to mint/mine/farm currency without paying in directly doesn't really negate that since it is intended to become more difficult as time progresses. The actual value comes from speculative investments from a growing number of people.
The spike in Dogecoin led to people talking about regretting not getting in on it. Feeling like they missed out on their chance. The motivations are clear. They wanted easy money. If it was about having a decentralized financial system then it wouldn't matter that they didn't get in early.
But it's an objective fact that you don't need to open an account with a financial institution to start using Bitcoin. That was always the case. Unlike religion, it actually delivers.
How do you buy bitcoins without it touching some financial institution at some point? You can buy bitcoin with cash, yes, but if it has to go through a financial institution or other regulated entity at any point then it is not delivering on any promise of independence from those institutions.
Why do you need to "buy" Bitcoin? Do some work for someone, sell them some produce you grew or something you made, have them pay you in BTC. Go to a vendor who also is happy to take Bitcoin, buy stuff you need in turn.
Yes, I know it's not happening much. Bitcoin has failed (so far) as a payment/exchange system, and that's cause for sadness to me, but also a good way to look at the history and ask the questions about why it has failed and how to go about creating a better "King-proof Money".
You're not going further in the chain: The person you work for has to buy bitcoins then. Or the next link in backwards has to. At some point, people will need to convert current assets into bitcoin. You're arguing from a point of view that requires bitcoin to already be an established currency. I'm saying that there is no practical way to get to that point without that sanction of governments to use traditional financial institutions along the way.
Further, even if you got there, governments could simply ban bitcoin. It then becomes extremely hard to use as a common medium of exchange because literally no legal business could accept it without risking the business and their life outside of prison.
It would also render useless the scenario of fleeing a despot country with hard currency assets intact because wherever your destination, those assets are still illegal to use.
All of this means that, at any point, governments could reduce bitcoin to-- at best-- another side of shadow banking, like how drugs can be a medium of exchange in the criminal world. That does not allow room for common usage by the masses.
Bitcoin & other crypto exist because nation states allow them to exist.
This reads like a person who has never used cryptocurrency or defi in any manner whatsoever. If I want to right now, I can get a multimillion dollar loan, no questions asked, against most any crypto I own for an interest rate lower than credit cards or scammy payday loans will charge. I can be a market maker for trades without being an institution and with no barrier to entry, I can liquidated overleveraged loans, I can trade derivatives otherwise not allowed to me by my country, and I mint and trade synthetic assets, the list goes on and on.
You're the one who sounds like they are subscribing to a religion and haven't actually even attempted to understand what financial freedoms are suddenly afforded to you when you use cryptocurrency.
There’s definitely some reasons for real value in defi but cheap loans is not one of them. With millions in collateral you can get ~1% APR from several places right now. That’s way lower than any crypto loan I know of. One way is to sign up for an IBKR account from several countries, and wire them assets, completely without human interaction.
I wasn't aware of this. What kind of collateralization ratio is required and what sort of assets are needed for this? Also signing up for an account from many countries sounds irritating and possibly illegal
As the sibling comment says, I mean you can access them from several countries.
Collateral requirements vary by asset and account country according to national law. Generally it’s 50% LTV on equity collateral but leverage can be higher depending on the case.
I paid for a house with their margin to avoid triggering gains on long term positions, while waiting for some locked up options to liquidate.
Financial freedom is an interesting topic, and one that I don’t have much expertise in.
What is cryptocurrency freeing you from? You listed several opportunities that cryptocurrency could provide you, but I don’t exactly see the correlation with financial freedom.
What is freedom if not the ability to take advantage of opportunities?
Again, the correlation is obvious to anyone who actually uses this stuff. If I want to trade on margin on Fidelity, I need to sign some forms, go through a lengthy application process which may or may not actually be accepted to finally be able to trade with high interest rates and non-transparent margin requirements (my fidelity margin requirements change out from under me nearly every single day) routed through rent seeking, too-big-to-fail hedge funds and dark pools with T+2 order execution and restrictions on when during the day I can trade (only during day trading hours). Oh and don't accidentally trip up a "good faith" violation and have your account suspended from margin trading for a month even though you've done nothing wrong, and their antiquated systems simply aren't able to account for the fact that you weren't, in fact, trading money you didn't have.
Just let me do what I want with my money, it's pretty simple. Sure maybe there are negative externalities that come with that, but freedom isn't free.
> "What is freedom if not the ability to take advantage of opportunities?"
We probably have differing perspectives of what freedom means. Financial freedom to me means dedicating my time to doing things that enrich my lived experience.
> "Again, the correlation is obvious to anyone who actually uses this stuff"
I don't know if it is your intention, but I find that to be dismissive and unnecessary. I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss opposing viewpoints with civility.
> If I want to right now, I can get a multimillion dollar loan, no questions asked, against most any crypto I own for an interest rate lower than credit cards or scammy payday loans will charge
Giving people loans with "no questions asked" has lead to significant amount of problems in the past.
I see your point but they are collateralized. Let's put it this way, my friend just bought his house and spent 2 weeks with mortgage agents and brokers. Meanwhile I deposit some ETH-USDC LP into maker and in 2 minutes get a no questions asked loan at 3.5%. Sure it's lower leverage when compared to most mortgages but I think my point still stands.
What happens when the price of BTC/ETH falls by 50%? I don't see how would lending at 3.5% (unless it's very short term) would make sense considering the risk.
Strange because I intentionally matched the tone of the comment I replied to. Comparing cryptocurrency to religion is incredibly ignorant at best, and trolling or FUDing at worst.
Its close (oh and I’m absolutely on your side here). It’s not a religion (this would require it be not-math and not-physics), but it is a very virulent meme, like religion. It might even be the greatest meme - that is, energy based PoW 21 million coin sha256^2/ripemd/ecdsa with 10 min blocks just as our savior Satoshi commanded. As another commenter said, it actually delivers unlike religion.
You could more concisely say that it is useful for completing transactions that are illegal, which encompasses nearly your entire list but I guess doesn't sound as nice.
I'm very curious how you got there. I certainly don't hold that belief. I do however hold the apparently very controversial view that we should have laws, and that they are pointless if they aren't enforceable. I think the only thing that really pins down about me is that I'm not an anarchist.
Crypto-currency’s _only_ use case today, other than speculation, is illegal payments. For almost everything else the traditional banking system is faster, cheaper, and safer.
It’s Saturday now in many places in the world. Can you move a few thousand USD between your two primary accounts at different traditional banks before Monday?
... yes? Faster Payments for my GBP balances and Prompt Pay for my THB ones tend to take a few seconds and be free?
Added bonus: both will confirm the recipient name, and if I truly, actually fuck up the payment, I can get the money back again rather than it disappearing into the ether.
Finally: the money I have transferred is now available to actually spend on things straight away, without needing to then reconvert it to real people money with a sizeable cost.
Just because the US has (comparatively) bad banking infrastructure doesn't mean most places do, most of Europe can do this and has been able to for years (though probably in EUR). This includes some cross-border payments.
And when you say "for years", it's really decades that this has been the norm for. In my experience it is the same in the more developed Asian countries, or really any high HDI country that is not the US.
Ok, but you're not denying the fact that it's a use case. Why should I have to suffer because the US financial infrastructure is stuck in the 1930s?
All technology becomes outdated at some point, if cryptocurrency is useful to me right now to perform basic financial operations how is that not a use case?
But you’re not moving spendable USD between your own accounts when you’re transferring Bitcoin, so it’s hard to see how this is related to your use case?
Don’t know, I’ve never had any need to do that. But I can pay a merchant $50 by credit card without spending $30 in transaction fees or waiting 30-60 minutes for confirmations.
Our two major bank-to-bank payment rails are the Automated Clearing House (ACH) and Wire Transfer. Both are "closed" on weekends for some reason. One could probably use something with debit cards like Venmo or purchase and hand off a cashier's check.
Yes: Many banks, at least in the US, are now open for limited times on Saturdays & Sundays. I can walk into one bank, get a cashiers check, and bring it to another bank, all with zero transaction costs. And possibly faster than Bitcoin, depending on the transaction fee I was willing to pay.
Yes, and it’s also illegal to spend over $10k in cash in Australia. And there ain’t no government that can stop a person from sending infinity via bitcoin any day of the week. Even the ones that believes that the laws of math don’t apply there.
Update; this was cancelled in Dec 2020. Got very close, a jurisdiction banning cash tx’s. And that is why Cryptocurrency, non state money is important.
Nowhere did I disagree with what you've said, except for your final sentence. The interesting thing about cryptocurrency is not that it facilitates illegal activities, but that it does very little else - and that is in fact quite different from the rest of your list.
> The interesting thing about cryptocurrency is not that it facilitates illegal activities, but that it does very little else - and that is in fact quite different from the rest of your list.
How can the same people who make this argument turn around and in the same breath decry Bitcoin for being nothing more than a speculative store of value? You can’t have it both ways.
No one buys Bitcoin to spend it. This much is abundantly clear. And Bitcoin, as an inflation-proof global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms, never had to do anything other than sit there as an idle speculation to fulfill its primary role as safest safe haven asset. That’s what makes it such a powerful idea.
Do you support all Chinese government laws? How about all US laws? Do you support all laws of all governments?
Many here are fairly libertarian, at least regarding drugs. Do you agree with every classification of every drug in US law and that all punishment for them is perfectly appropriate?
In the past you’d be denied banking for the color of your skin or treated differently based on genitalia.
Illegal is only defined by imperfect governments. So yes, it allows for illegal things, that’s a great thing.
It also means you won’t have an account closed for thoughtcrime, or cheering the wrong political party. It means an authoritarian government can’t keep you locked there. And it means you can avoid myriad kafka-esque dystopic mishaps of “the system”, nightmarish AI flagging slip ups that close your account or prevent you from sending money to a relative in need in another county because it’s Sunday or you forgot to renew you drivers license.
Not to mention you can now use code to manipulate your money, give early users real equity in your company and design fully digital co-ops, avoid some of the burden of blatant classist laws like accredited investors, and design incentive mechanisms for your startup that are guaranteed in code.
Interesting that all of the pro-cryptocurrency folks read this as an attack. I quite carefully did not place value, positive or negative, on it. Perhaps the fact that you read it that way reveals your true thoughts on the matter.
No, I don't support all laws in pretty much any regime. But I do believe that the ability to enforce laws is important. The only thing that consistently works more poorly than having rules is not having any rules at all.
You are of course welcome to move to a lawless state if this is really what you want, but I suspect you would not find it to be the utopia you dream of.
How is this anything but dismissive? Your whole post was insinuating it’s only utility is for illegal things, in context implying that’s what makes it non-valuable. If you weren’t making that claim, then there’s no point to your post. Don’t hide from your own claim and act coy now. It was obviously dismissive, and now just looks like you’re backsliding. Not to mention the straw man turning “some laws are bad and you should be able to resist them” into “live in a lawless state”. Or that you ignore the litany of non-illegal uses I added.
In fact, I’m skeptical of 99% of the field, I believe without PoS it should fail and isn’t worth the cost, and I was a harder skeptic until recently and changed my mind because I honestly believe I’ve seen some truly interesting uses now outside of being a freer currency.
Get outside of “pro” or “anti” box and think in terms of utilities and specifics, and if you reply reply to my specific claims.
Maybe if someone can't remember to renew a license that asserts their competency in operating lethally dangerous machinery then they should also not be trusted with financial transactions until they resolve that situation.
There’s a technology out that you might like as a libertarian. The tech is untraceable, doesn’t have a built in chain of ownership logged on the internet, and everyone measures the value of their latest blockchain based off of it. It’s called cash.
Not a libertarian just a guy who doesn’t agree with every law everywhere.
Monero and other privacy coins don’t have a traceable ledger.
Now clear this up for me... how do you send a ton of cash anywhere in the world in minutes without risk? Is it easy to smuggle out of an authoritarian gov? Can you manipulate it with code?
Cash is a great way to pick up bitcoin anonymously though, you make a good point.
It’s a cancer metastasizing in all components of value and scarcity. Why this type of operation is not banned globally, but coexist with climate change worry, is a perfect indicator of mass delusion.
> It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat
Not true. All kinds of blockchain development is happening in hundreds of fields.
The most important development so far is deflationary capped currencies independent of any single government. Currencies that almost anyone in the world can use, which helps the poor in the countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran.
The Ethereum Swarm project uses the blockchain and smart contracts to offer completely anonymous and decentralized file storage space, for which the node operators are rewarded with crypto.
It's still in beta and actively developed, though. But I hope it will overtake Chia because it is actually useful.
Someone should write a book about an AI that is developed as a new cryptocurrency, with PoW providing it insane amounts of compute power to its AI algorithm instead of performing dumb hashing races and proof of space providing insane amounts of fast storage. And us humans feeding it more and more of both out of pure greed, until it eventually becomes self-aware.
> It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks.
That isn’t strictly true. Before the advent of Bitcoin, there was no global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. That simple academic experiment was quickly infiltrated by profiteers, however. Most people never cared to cultivate an understanding of Bitcoin beyond the barest of surface level understandings, and these same people are now able to finger point at blatantly self-serving get-rich-quick ICO projects — like Ethereum and Chia — which have clearly achieved nothing in spite of endlessly promising investors “innovation”.
The only thing innovative that has ever come out of the Bitcoin space is Bitcoin itself: a speculative store of value. Every national currency is similarly speculative, and people who “missed” Bitcoin are loathe to admit the same thing that happened to gold’s market capitalization prior to its ubiquitous use as money, is now happening to Bitcoin.
> there was no global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms
That is not good in itself.
> That simple academic experiment
Original description by its author intended it as a replacement for a payment system and currencies, not as an academic experiment or as a store of value useless for normal transactions
Every aspect of cryptocurrency save for one either fails to solve any societal issue, exascerbates existing ones, or is otherwise hype entrepreneurship.
But the deflationary global economic system Bitcoin facilitates disincentivizes mass consumerism — mass consumerism which is destroying the world’s natural ecosystems. This is only possible via a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. Bitcoin’s creator invented this. It is an innovation, in every sense.
Deflationary economics discourages capital investment, because it rewards saving — i.e. “hoarding” — not spending or investing. Assuming a Bitcoin-based economic system, as the pace of technological advancement continues to quicken, and more products and services hit the market, absolute BTC-denominated prices will have to decrease. More products and services on the market, with a fixed supply of money, equals lower absolute prices.
In addition, global adoption of a free-market money like Bitcoin would eliminate the ability of governments to fund weapons of war and public works projects by printing their own money. That would no longer be possible.
Bitcoin throttles humanity, and with it humanity’s ecological destructiveness could be kept at bay. No other aspect of cryptocurrency is of societal value in any way.
Crypto is valuable only if we believe it is. Once we discover a way to transmit money that has benefits over crypto, we'll gradually move to that, the same way transactions that felt limited by fiat moved to crypto.
Isn't it possible to create a crypto currency where mining it computes something useful? Like larger and larger prime numbers or digits of pi or protein folding or something like that.
Yes, but a useful proof-of-work leads to a less secure block chain. Bitcoin is secure because you know that an attacker that wants to change the second to last block has to spend X million on computational peer to do that. But if those computations are useful outside mining itself, then the attack might become much chapter or almost free
Bitcoin has tremendous value. Not as a currency or financial processing network. Those are pipe dreams. But in bringing the power of cryptographic and blockchain technologies to prominence.
Not quite. The key of the profit motive is it generally produces at least some useful output. For example, if you mine oil, you have externalities of course, but at least someone finds the end product useful and humans get a benefit. And you can create a framework of laws and rules to capture the externalities. (We haven’t, but we could, and are starting to)
A paperclip maximizer is incentives gone wrong. People wants profits so they can do something with them. But the AI wants paperclips because it is programmed to want paperclips, and it does so to the detriments of any other goals. It would devour the child of the AI designer to turn her into an input for paperclip production.
> It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat.
I don't get how people keep bringing this up.
So it's all pure speculation is what you're saying?
So what are some of the reasons people want crypto?
1. As a store of value. Fiat currencies lose purchasing power over time by design. Especially now that interest rates are funny. If people/businesses (Tesla) want to preserve the buying power of their income/capital, they can not just keep their USD or EUR on RMB in their bank account. Traditionally gold fulfilled this function, but gold has limitations being bulky and all. Furthermore the COMEX where the gold price is decided is completely dysfunctional due to institutionalized deeply rooted corruption. Example: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jpmorgan-to-pay-%24920-mln-f... (note that this manipulation is ongoing and the fine was a fraction of what JP Morgan made on these spoofing trades).
People are turning to something that cannot centrally be corrupted as easily by a few governments and bankers. People and society as we know it NEED a store of value. So they're turning to one of the few options left: crypto.
2. As a safe haven from a corrupted US/international financial system. See point 1. Metals price manipulations are just a small fraction of the corruption that goes on. There's a reason why Elon Musk Tweeted something along the lines of "Bitcoin, in retrospect it will be inevitable." Tesla stock got naked shorted into oblivion by hedge funds while the SEC did nothing. Coincidence? US companies get deliberately shorted into bankruptcy by hedge funds (case in point: GameStop where this strategy failed). And then there's the share rehypothecation scam with perpetual failures to deliver on institutional trading positions and so on. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925if_/http://www.rgm...
Does it still seem like a silly nerdy gamble now that Tesla converts some of it's cash into BTC? Not to me anyway.
3. As a free bank account with upgraded features like almost instant tranfers and total privacy (in case of ZEC and MNR). Ever tried to transfer money to a foreign bank account, thereby losing a significant percentage to currency conversion fees and other fees? Or over the weekend with a national holiday on Friday? You'd be lucky if the money gets into the other account within 4 days. It's infuriating IMO. And now it's also unnecessary, because: crypto.
4. Democratization of the cloud computing market. Example: decentralized yet commercial file transfers: https://skynet-send.hns.siasky.net/ There are other applications like coins that allow you to render Blender projects in exchange for a tiny fee.
So... Can anybody explain to me how all of the above is "nothing" and how the alternatives are somehow clearly more energy efficient and less damaging to the environment (lol: gold mining)? The down voting is not really doing it.
Your understanding of money is seriously flawed. Fiat currencies don't lose purchasing power over time by design. Central banks have a public mandate to maintain price stability and to create a low level of inflation, and that's what central banks do. The rate of inflation/deflation isn't an intrinsic characteristic of any currency (including cryptocurrencies) but the result of a particular monetary policy. For example, a country could instruct its central bank to reduce the increase in the money supply at a constant rate, like bitcoin does, instead of maintaining price stability. Nobody does this because it's thought to be a terrible monetary policy (would be pro-cyclical, leading to large price swings and deeper boom-bust cycles), not because it can't be done.
> Fiat currencies don't lose purchasing power over time by design. and to create a low level of inflation.
Inflation of fiat currency = loss of purchasing power of fiat currency. So these two sentences contradict each other.
And I get the point that the idea is that this inflation should be constant and there's nothing wrong with it in theory. Sure. Fine.
But that doesn't change the fact that keeping x USD on a bank account for x years decreases the purchasing power of that amount of money. And that that decrease in purchasing power is not desirable. So people try to maintain that purchasing power by converting those USD into something else. We used to have saving accounts, but yeah... those ceased to function due to negative interest rates.
And that's all without going into the scenario where the central banks are failing at their mission to maintain price stability. Which arguably is happening right now and is arguably the reason why people are dumping fiat currency in exchange for anything else that can better preserve buying power.
Am I wrong here so far?
Am I arguing that crypto is inherently and permanently a better currency than fiat? No. Not at all. Am I arguing that fiat currencies are currently not a great store of value: absolutely. And in that situation to preserve your buying power, you buy things you think will retain purchasing power better. I personally (and obviously many others) believe crypto could serve as protection as well as other assets that "can't be printed by governments and central banks". Is it speculation? yes, of course. But so is keeping fiat cash as fiat cash.
Keeping cash balances is undesirable because of the opportunity cost not because of inflation. In other words, even if inflation was at -10% you still would want to keep as little cash as possible and invest the rest at the risk-free rate.
And I don't agree that central banks are failing to maintain price stability. Inflation data indicates otherwise [1] [2]. If anything, central banks are failing to create enough inflation to meet their inflation targets.
> Keeping cash balances is undesirable because of the opportunity cost not because of inflation.
I don't get this statement. IMO it's undesirable for both reasons.
From the point of view of holding USD on a savings account -10% inflation (aka: 10 deflation) is the same as 2% inflation with savings accounts that reek in 12% interest rates. You're arguing that nobody in the world should want to have such a savings account? Everybody should invest it in something at a risk-free rate? You mean a risk-free investment? I'm not sure what that means.
> And I don't agree that central banks are failing to maintain price stability.
I'm talking 2020 - 2021, as in: right now. The data you link goes until 2019 pre-corona, pre-helicopter-money times.
Here in Europe there's without a single doubt in my mind stagflation going on right now (prices that rise faster than the average income).
Holding cash in a bank account is IMO a guaranteed significant loss of purchasing power right now. If you take 1 look at past year's commodity prices, you'll see that the market agrees with me.
Year over year examples: lumber spot price up 300% up, silver 74% up, gold (the gold standard for measuring inflation) 5% up, housing prices 10 - 30% up, wheat price 25% up, and so on and so forth.
Does this mean all these things have all of a sudden become more desirable? No. Does it mean the USD/EUR/etc have lost buying power? IMO very big yes.
The opportunity cost of cash is the return that you would have earned if you had invested in a risk-free asset instead of keeping the cash. By keeping cash you incur such a cost, whether there is inflation of not, and this means you should always keep as little cash as possible regardless of inflation. For example, if the inflation rate is -10% and the return on a (risk-free) savings account is 1%, then you are incurring an opportunity cost of 1% annually by keeping cash balances. If the inflation rate is 10%, you are incurring the same exact cost. So while cash balances can absolutely depreciate as a result of inflation, cash balances should represent a small fraction of a household's net worth anyway, since it's not optimal to hold large amounts of cash. Therefore a modest rate of inflation, such as we observe in developed nations, is never going to have a significant impact on household balance sheets, compared to other forms of depreciation such as the normal depreciation of physical capital (e.g. houses and cars).
It has produced poor people easily to be able to store their wealth something that they can both afford and isn't constantly being debased. Something they can trade without an intermediary, that can't be trivially censored or confiscated. Something that doesn't require taking great risks and effort in transporting like physical gold. I think that's definitely worth something.
Crypto only needs resources as much as it needs security and throughput. More efficient cryptos will win as they are cheaper.
> It has produced poor people easily to be able to store their wealth something that they can both afford and isn't constantly being debased
I can't get excited about people too poor to have access to banking putting their money into something as severely volatile as crypto currency.
There is room for new financial companies supporting mobile banking and banking in the developing world, but I don't see why crypto needs to be involved.
Except that’s not how value works in a human, emotional sense . Without agreements (maybe some crypto’s have that implicitly? Idk) the value will plummet, scale, inflate, deflate without reason or sometimes apparent cause.
There might be countries where there are advantages to crypto (say Turkey who was in the news) where it’s a better short term alternative, but crypto in my book is as speculative as ever, and I have seen nothing that changes my mind.
I’ve heard (don’t know how true it is) there also there are also some big players who have big hoards of a coin and can dump or pump a value at their wim.
Uselessly filling storage devices incurs a needless and wasteful environmental cost, just the same as computing hashes does. At least Filecoin provides distributed storage, which allows the storage devices to be put to something resembling their intended use.
From what I read about Chia, the marketing is the exact opposite : most people have unused storage space, and they will never use it (phones and computers). The Chia network proposes to make that free space more "useful".
Filecoin enforces tremendous waste, only a small portion of total network space is used for storage. The equipment needed to mine costs tens of thousands of dollars.
With Chia, anyone can farm with minimal electricity cost (after plotting).
it increases security per unit of energy significantly making the amount of energy needed to secure the network orders of magnitude smaller than bitcoin. its also asic resistant, and having a lower barrier to entry makes it so the people with 0 cost basis just filling up extra space on their drive will outcompete & push out any large data farms increasing decentralization as well.
Your point about electricity cost is true. Once plotting is done (which takes hours per plot, few days for most drives), the only power draw is on idle drives. The transactions don’t require endless plotting the way proof of work would require endless mining.
Storj recommends you have a server with at least 128GB of ram and a powerful GPU before joining the network. The problem is the whole system is zero trust so you must constantly be calculating proofs to show you have all of the data and that it is always available.
It’s much more efficient to just have one large data enter with a reputation and trust. They have to store all of the data to keep their reputation.
This gives me a mental image of trying to fill a sheet of paper with a #2 pencil as fast as possible.
By the way, I am selling fully penciled sheets of paper for $USD one million each. They are unique because I am only human and can't fill the page perfectly evenl every time. They can be eaily minted as nft's for $USD two million. dm for details.
I will admit that I do not get this coin. At all. Now, if someone came up with a way to store valuable data on everybody elses hdds and have them distributed this way; basically storing secrets via coin.. I could kinda get the reason for all this insanity.
I'm surprised they would honor any warranty claims where the drive has been written to beyond its specified terabytes written endurance. Is it that this farming causes more damage for the same amount of data written than normal use?
From looking at numbers from the macOS SSD thrashing issue, we know lifetime usage as reported by SMART is not a strict function of terabytes written (at least on those SSDs). This makes sense, because small writes have a much higher endurance cost than large writes on SSDs. SSD lifetime isn't based on total bytes written, it's based on total blocks erased in the underlying Flash, and blocks are much larger than sectors so small writes necessarily cause write amplification to some extent (depending on the wear leveling).
If manufacturers are guaranteeing a certain number of TBW on SSDs but can't actually sustain that at pathological write sizes, they need to start qualifying those guarantees with e.g. an average write size statistic. Then they can claim Chia breaks that assumption and reject warranty claims in those cases.
This isn't unique to Chia. For example, a database workload will cause higher stress per byte written on an SSD than a raw video recording workload.
It's also possible they're talking about time-based warranties with daily usage numbers. Many SSDs will be "guaranteed for 5 years" at some DWPD (drive writes per day). In that case they're probably just saying Chia plotting greatly exceeds the DWPD stat and thus your number of years warranty no longer applies. That ignores the above problem and is just about how the drive endurance is specified.
(Also, just to clarify: apparently SSDs are used in Chia as a staging ground to build data to put on HDDs, which is then read only; I don't think there is any endurance cost to disks for actually "farming" Chia, only for "plotting" the contents of those disks initially; I think Chia is silly but just want to get the tech right)
Is there any way to extend the lifetime of a SSD by allowing its capacity to decrease by replenishing its reserve of replacement blocks so that the SSD could continue to operate until it runs out of writable blocks?
A SSD that presents as a traditional hard-drive style block storage device can't shrink itself on the fly without causing catastrophic software problems. The least bad way to implement such behavior would be for the highest-numbered LBAs to be removed first, which means your backup partition table is first to disappear, then you start encountering filesystem corruption.
A zoned SSD has an explicit mechanism for the drive retiring zones from service and making them read-only or completely inaccessible. But it's not currently practical to use a zoned storage device as the primary or sole storage in a system; at a minimum you need a regular block device or namespace to boot an OS from.
Theoretically this would be possible but probably wouldn't help much in practice. Writes on an SSD aren't mapped 1:1 from "logical" address to physical address - they constantly balance and move writes around the entire device (the "Flash Translation Layer" it's sometimes called). As a result once you have exhausted the normal reserve capacity (perhaps allowing for some early life failures) I suspect it's likely the rest of the device will soon follow and you wouldn't extend it's life by that useful an amount.
I don't have hard data however on like the "curve" of flash cell failures as an SSD ages and therefor exactly how much longer you might get based on the minimum to median cell failure.
Generally, you would look to a datacenter line of SSD which is rated for much higher endurance. These are typically overprovisioned much more than consumer ssds in order to meet the endurance requirements.
I think most OEMs opt not to let you choose this sort of thing and rather bury it into the drive firmware.
Does Chia do lots of small writes? A lot of these plot generation steps sound like the writes are pretty linear. Plus sorting, which can easily be designed to use big writes too.
That sounds like what they're saying. I imagine when they determine warranties they're looking at what they estimate to be "normal" use? Reading/writing to capacity 24/7 certainly creates a lot of heat for a long time.
That was already known, it's an included spec when you're buying an SSD and already written into the warranties... this is an additional warning for this use case:
>“If users use our SSDs for mining/farming and other abnormal operations, the data writing volume is much higher than the standard for daily use, and the SSD will slow down or get damaged due to excessive data writing volume. Due to the tests carried out, the damages are qualitative according to the test results, and that is why according to the quality assurance standards of our SSDs, we have the right to refuse to provide warranty services. The right of final interpretation belongs to the company."
They're specifically calling out "standard for daily use"...
One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty?
Most SSDs aren't designed for the repeated writing Chia requires. "Data center" or "high-endurance" SSDs have that capacity but are consequently more expensive.
>One alternative explanation is that maybe farmers were just wearing them out quickly and playing naive to claim the warranty?
That's exactly what they were doing. If you use a low cost "consumer" SSD you can wear it out very quickly then claim it was "defective."
> Most SSDs aren't designed for the repeated writing Chia requires.
It doesn't require all that many writes. Problems come from a conscious decision to use a small number of SSDs as scratch space for a very large array.
Every SSD spec sheet has a Total Bytes Written (TBW) spec and Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) and many warranties say that they don't cover wearout beyond those specs. It's akin to a tire rated for 50,000 miles; if it fails beyond that it's not defective.
It seems like an interesting denial of service attack against storage. Part of the challenge of the surveillance state is that it is "easy" to keep everything since storage is so cheap, but if you wanted to make storage expensive, and could not dictate the market prices, you could create a system that consumed massive amounts of storage and removed it from being available for other uses.
That said, people burning up SSDs by writing stuff to them seems, kind of par for the course. I wonder if these same SSD vendors exclude video surveillance from their warranties? After all storing HD video 24/7/365 is a lot of writing and typically way more than the "normal" use.
Yes and no. Typical multi-camera video systems can generate data at a prodigious rate. You can "either" put together a RAID system to handle the write bandwidth your you can use a couple of SSDs. The latter is "simpler" the former is more "economical".
That said, when NetApp was trying to sell SATA based filers into this market (which, not surprisingly is VERY cost sensitive) two things became apparent. First, up front system cost had to be minimized, and the vendors of these systems saw disk failure as a revenue opportunity to "roll a truck" to the customer and replace a failed drive.
I have been thinking about trying Chia mining to learn about it but haven’t read the details. One video said that his HDD was only like 2x the time to farm a plot compared to a SATA SSD and the real bottleneck is long term storage so I can’t see why anyone would be in such a rush that they would burn out their SSD. Haven’t looked too deeply into it yet though.
Chia 'mining' is done in two phases. You create a 'plot' once which is very CPU, memory, and above all disk write/seek intensive. Then you can 'farm' that plot with low resources.
Plotting is both CPU and IO bound. Plotting can't fully take advantage of multiple cores. The workaround is to start N plots, each taking ~400GB of space and ~2 cores. On an 8 core server with 2x800 GB SSD, you can do 4 plots in parallel.
Assuming you only had 512GB of RAM, you'd only be able to do 1 plot at a time (since you need 400GB per plot). Plotting to RAM would need to be 4x faster, but it isn't since you'll be CPU bound. So it would be both slower and more expensive.
You need ~300Gb of 'temp' space per plotting process. So you could only do 1 plot on a system that with a fast SSD you could do 6 or more plots in parallel.
Chia's problem is your chance of "winning" is directly proportional to the global number of participating plots.
Adding plots costs 100GB a time, so an 8GB drive can get you about 80. If you want to double that, you must buy another drive. Double it again, two, four, eight drives etc, and they're like $200 each.
The number of participating plots you are competing with though, is going up exponentially. That will double by itself in a couple of weeks.
So people in at the ground floor, who premined, will do great, the whale-sized farming operations with a significant fraction of the lottery tickets will do great, for everybody else every hour dilutes their chance of "winning" anything.
8TB, once processed the default plots are 100GB and can live on slower media. While being created, they require 240GB of temp space on preferably faster media.
That's where the SSD problem comes from, during creation the 240GB is thrashed, it is reused for every plot made. So an 8TB storage for finished plots implies 80 finished 100GB plots, which implies 80 x 240GB of thrashing on the SSD to produce them.
I am actually really curious why does Chia take off like this? Any other Proof of Space coin like Spacemesh and Burst coin didn't have this kind of explosive growth.
Seems like Andreessen Horowitz, among others, are investors. I bet they know how to market things.
Even stuff like this post could be PR. "Hey, SSD makers, would doing this void my warranty? It would, can you clearly state that in writing somewhere? Thanks!" Then you call your friend at guru3d with an interesting article tip and a link to their updated warranty, and suddenly everyone's wondering why they can't mine chia coin. Who are you to tell me I can't mine chia coin! I must mine it!
Maybe, maybe not. I'd assume that bittorrent is what has the brand name power and caused the much higher level of interest than was seen for similar currency schemes.
People have nothing better to do with their money and want to get returns from unproductive pseudo-ponzi schemes because they see other people doing it.
90% of it is just hype be from intensive marketing riding on the tail of the de-fi fad. Though compared to other "storage" coins it's backed by people with good track record and they have consistently worked with institutional investors to get an IPO/ETF so any loss of value down the road would be socialized and you would not be holding the bags alone.
It's never about da tech or mah decentralisacion, just some maaaad gainz that may and may not happen.
A large number of Chia's executive team came from Overstock.com, a company that's been instrumental in pumping up the value of cryptocurrencies both in 2013 and 2017. Sure they could pull this off again, right?
The answer to “why now” is that they turned on their mainnet in March, so the farming for real coins began then. It got some press, at least in crypto land, and it’s very accessible to start small scale plotting by yourself. Everyone has spare disk space.
The ability to trade coins (but not necessarily their listing on exchanges) will begin in a matter of days.
Chia's design philosophy is the overall best in my opinion. Actually trying to make a useful cryptocurrency rather than just pure speculative vehicle of other shitcoins.
How is Chia useful? I just looked at their website and don't see what differentiates from other cryptocurrency. I see you mine with hard drive space rather than compute (like FileCoin) but I don't get why this would be useful.
That means it doesn't have the same cost as bitcoin. That says nothing about why Chia coin is useful. Can I do anything with it, or is it one of those things where I buy it now in the hopes other people will buy it from me for more later?
I don't know if anybody has done the math on how much energy/CO2 it costs to construct a hard drive vs. used in PoW mining with GPUs or ASICs but I'd love to see it.
They haven't decided Chia is the one; big miners have been rushing into every new coin that launches, including Filecoin and now Chia. It's a "deal flow" approach where you mine 50 shitcoins and hope one pops 1000x.
As far as I can tell, the Storage Market basically ate the demand the miners made and has resettled on the old prices (atleast in my region, only a short price spike).
The entire Chia network as it stands only amounts to a few hours of storage sales compared to the volume put out over the year.
Why blame the supply when you can blame the demand instead?
Just like if there is food shortage, it's probably the fault of humans for consuming too much food, not the fault of the producers for making too little.
I think you missed my point a bit. I'm saying that it's a bit strange and out-of-place to blame the demand side of things here, instead of blaming the supply.
What the thing is used for is irrelevant in the end. Most food goes to "waste" as well, but you don't see people making much uproar over that.
>What the thing is used for is irrelevant in the end.
That's some weird axioms you have in your reasoning. It's not irrelevant. Crypto waste literally makes technological progress more expensive -- it probably already affects drug development, and decades later someone will probably publish a study on how the crypto craze delayed crucial cancer drug development programs by years.
And blaming supply is much harder, considering supply is relatively inelastic, chip fabs take years and billions of dollars of planning and construction, and they can't wholeheartedly rely on the fickle crypto demand, on the decisions of crypto stakeholders to go or not to go "proof of stake" and the like.
And that's when crypto demand shouldn't even exist in an ideal world to begin with. The whole crypto ideology of "deflationary money free from institutions and government regulations" is just wrong, not something we should want, and would end up regulated anyway. (We should want better regulated better institutions) Not to mention that this ideology is mostly mentioned to justify the unbridled speculation and ponzi-like nature of the current crypto -- nobody really cares about it, it's a "get rich quick, fuck everything and everyone" scheme for most of the crypto users.
>Most food goes to "waste" as well,
As a side effect of purposeful consumption. It's below 50% by most estimates, and considered a problem. We all need to eat to survive, need to eat well to feel good. While the computer hardware demand and waste from "get rich quick" technologies is entirely inessential, and arguably harmful.
> The whole crypto ideology of "deflationary money free from institutions and government regulations" is just wrong, not something we should want
Yeah, I figured you were of this opinion, and then this whole discussion breaks down. You're not arguing in good faith here, so this discussion is just wasting both of our time.
Sometime in the future you'll realize that different people want different things, and you'll help yourself by at least trying to understand the other side sometimes.
I can refute shifting the blame to suppliers, or say that it's relevant how usefully resources are utilized only if I agree or am neutral towards the crypto ideology? Ok, man.
Chia was supposed to be a less wasteful version of Bitcoin that would remain inherently decentralized, but already three days before release it's chewing through the high-end SSD supply chain, and the number one request farmers have is to be able to centralize into big farming pools. And these pools won't be along some co-operative model where everyone can pool their existing plots—pooling will require re-plotting, so the centralizing dynamic will be in full swing.
This was not just predictable but repeatedly and boringly predicted, and yet here we are. Good luck getting high-performance drives next year because Bram Cohen went and reinvented bingo.
The immense technical sophistication of this project, coupled with the failure to anticipate even the most basic first-order effects, make me wonder what's going on in the minds of the founders.
I think you may be making a false assumption that sophisticated and interesting technology reflects some sort of moral intention.
I find it at least a tad disingenuous to ponder this "What could this soon-to-be-very-wealthy technologist possibly have been thinking?" line of thought. It's cliche at this point.
I've met Bram Cohen and have no difficulty believing he's sincere about his aims, and also so smart in some dimensions that it's overflowed into foolishness.
Am I the only one annoyed beyond belief by cryptocoins of all kinds?
* Bitcoin wastes an enormous amount of electricity, to the point mining ops have been buying up derelict power plants and powering them up again, and on top of that Iran and North Korea use Bitcoin to finance their dictatorships
* Shitcoins have led to GPUs being unaffordably expensive for years now
* Not to mention loads of people getting scammed with pump & dump schemes, shitcoins, the plague that is NFT or hackers using Bitcoin to transfer cryptolocker ransom money
* And now, this new shitcoin makes people raid cheap SSDs.
Just how much are we willing to endure? At some point this shit has to stop.
I don't fall under any of those categories. I'm a registered and compliant digital currency business and regulated under our national law. Banks don't want to work with me, not just for my business, but also personally.
If you're thinking about getting into Chia farming with your consumer hardware, don't bother. The total network space has increased exponentially the last couple of weeks to a point where 1 TB of plots gives you a chance to win a block in 10 years of active farming.
Not FUD. I'm farming Chia myself but it looks pretty hopeless so just giving my honest review that no-one should expect to win any reward anytime soon without betting big on hardware.
Regarding the calculation and estimation: "Actual results may take 3 to 4 times longer than this estimate."
So 10 months to 3 years to win one single block which will give you 2 XCH. Considering the total network space rising at the rate we're seeing I think we should review this calculation again in a week.
What happened to the proof-of-useful-space algorithms? Eg. the promise of Filecoin: A proof of space based distributed cryptocoin, where the space is offered as usable storage for end-users who pays the said crypto.
It doesn't really work in practise. For example you could have two clients sharing a hard drive with both claiming to independently store the same files. There is no way of actually proving the data is being usefully stored.
No you can't? To my understanding although you can't guarantee thst the two clients aren't sharing a hard drive (or datacenter) you can guarentee there are two copies.
It is impossible to force someone to actually transmit the stored file. They can prove they have it, but you can't force them to not ransom you to get it back.
Chia devs themselves recommend not using consumer-grade drives, since they're not built for running at 100% all day.
> The one thing in common will be that you need high endurance, due to the fact that it take almost ~1.8TB of writes using the -e flag or 1.6TB without that option to create a single K=32 plot.
> Endurance is how much data can be written to the SSD before it wears out. In Chia this is important because a plotting SSD will generally be at 100% duty cycle and writing all day.
> A mixed use or high endurance data center or enterprise SSD is the best choice for plotting. Used SSDs with plenty of endurance can be found for a good value on eBay, Craigslist, or similar.
> Consumer NVMe SSDs are generally not recommended due to the lower endurance, and they often employ caching algorithms to faster media (SLC, or single level cell) for great bursty performance. They do not perform well under heavy workload sustained IO. There are very high performance consumer NVMe SSDs that will offer great plotting performance, but the lower rated endurance in TBW will result in a faster wearout.
TFA mentions the current warranty has qualitative wording around what the company gets to decide is "normal" usage. That may be objectionable but I don't think they're technically changing it, but perhaps clarifying in newer warranties. I'm definitely not defending any positions to be clear.
Note that there are other non-mining activities that can also put the hurt on an SSD. Distributed computing projects such as BOINC can also get their licks in.
World Community Grid has just put up a GPU application for their COVID-19 BOINC project (at this point, let's call it the equivalent of a 1.0 release), and some users have reported an average of 20 MB/second of continuous writes during the project-wide stress test that's going on. It makes me exceedingly glad that I put my project directory on spinning rust. Others have been using ramdisks to spare their SSDs.
If I understand it correctly, plotting is what needs fast storage, but not particularly reliable storage. Farming requires durable storage and the volumes would be better served for now with hard disks.
I wonder if RAM wouldn’t be a good option for plotting. Sure it would demand a beefy machine, but it’d be well under a large mining rig.
Can someone explain Chia coin to me? I can wrap my head around BTC and ETH, but this is more esoteric ( and frankly reads even more like MLM thing than regular crypto ).
what's the likelihood that Chia, if taken up, will have a similar effect on storage (supply issues etc) as BTC has had on processing hardware? I don't have enough technical knowledge to know how credible the claims in their whitepaper are
This is a pretty scorching take in context. I’ve noticed the warranty on most of the power tools I’ve purchased are 3-5 years but only 3-12 months for commercial use.
Of course there is a reason for this. I’m going to use this impact driver a few times a month. A construction company might use it several hours per day.
The purpose of the warranty is to guard against a defective product, not abuse. Everything has a service life and if my drill craps out on me a year in and I’ve barely used it that’s probably no fault of my own.
I don’t trust companies to not abuse most tools and certainly warranties ebb-and-flow in their consumer friendliness, but this is a pretty absurd take on this specific case.
Would you mind giving passers-by a 101 on Chia? Had never heard of it before. Recognise Bram's name obviously, but why is this interesting and valuable rather than another shitcoin? Bram's name alone has no weight in this area from what I can tell
The #1 argument against Bitcoin and Proof-of-work consensus in general is that it's harmful for the environment. Chia and other Proof-of-Space consensus coins promise environmentally-friendly consensus (because running the algorithm requires very little energy, and in theory it should be be unprofitable to produce or acquire hardware specifically for mining it), that is also decentralized.
Despite the buzz around cryptocurrency prices, there have been very little new working decentralized consensus algos since 2009. Most alternatives (the shitcoins you're talking about) compromised on decentralization and/or security. Chia has the potential to be a strictly better Bitcoin on almost all points.
(I'm neither an investor, nor a miner, nor do I own any of the coins, I've simply been enthusiastically waiting for its release since it was first announced)
> it should be be unprofitable to produce or acquire hardware specifically for mining it
If the coin becomes important or profitable, would this still be true? It seems like some of these coins replace direct energy use (coal/nuclear) with indirect energy use (create chips in factories from mined materials, all using coal/nuclear).
My impression is that the storage space is not actually capable of being used for anything. In other words, it is just as wasteful as existing cryptocurrency, just in terms of storage hardware instead of compute.
It is becoming increasingly maddening to me that people still think this is a good idea.
they're targeting 20 tps which is roughly 5x bitcoin and pretty similar to ethereum's tps. they're planning to rely on layer 2 scaling because bram thinks sharding is a bad idea when it comes to security. it's definitely not competing with s3, just trying to be better than bitcoin in terms of decentralization, power usage & programmable money with chialisp & colored coins.
Wait, it's not like Filecoin, where the space is made available to other people? The storage is just being deliberately wasted? That sounds ridiculous.
While I'm no proponent of storage mining, I do feel a little empathy. First they sell products that don't stand up as well to wear, then they wash their hands of it when you actually want to use the thing. Feels a bit like when stainless steel appliances gave way to plastic ones.
That's why I stopped buying entry-level, and prefer enterprise SSD's or at least good brands that publish endurance figures and have held up to third-party testing proving them out.
Here are some fun experiments writing to SSD's for days/months/years on end to see how long they'd last:
[1] https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
[2] https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9rl1lp19?p=9#r179
[3] http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SS...
I have no problem with a manufacturer publishing a lifetime write rating and denying the warranty once you've exceeded it. But unless they were up-front about it, amending the terms afterward by saying "well, we never intended you to use it like that" seems a cop-out.