Chia Network: Can it lead to HDD & SSD Shortage?

Chia Network is a brand new cryptocurrency whose popularity is currently rising. It was founded by Bram Cohen, the same person who invented the peer-to-peer BitTorrent Network. The Chia blockchain has an active open-source developer community with many contributions to the codebase. The Chia Network also has its own on-chain programming language called “Chialisp”. Currently, it is predicted that we could face a Hard Drive shortage along with the price surge as Chinese cryptocurrency miners flock to this new cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency is scheduled to start trading on May 3rd, 2021.

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Why could it lead to Hard Drive shortage and price surge?

As of now Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency and it requires a lot of processing power and electricity for mining. There is a high demand for graphics card from the people who mine cryptocurrencies, due to which the price of a graphics card is high. And now as Chia Network works on the Proof of Space and Time (PoST) Algorithm unlike Proof of Stake (PoS) and Bitcoins PoW mechanism. The price of hard drive storage is also expected to rise as the network uses hard drive storage capacity for its consensus mechanism. Proof of Space is a technique where unused hard drive space is allocated for storage space and Proof of Space has to be tied to Proof of Time to be used as a consensus method. Instead of Miners, Chia network participants are called Farmers. As reported by an online media house, multiple models of enterprise-grade hard drives with large capacity have already sold out on Chinese e-commerce platforms Taobao and JD.com.

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What is Cryptocurrency?

As defined by Investopedia, “A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Many cryptocurrencies are decentralized networks based on blockchain technology—a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers.”