But the expectation of growth in its value has led to a surge in demand for the hardware required to “mine” it, since the earlier the work is done, the more likely users are to get a payout, according to Cohen, the currency’s creator.

About $50m (£35m) worth of the currency was traded in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap, compared with $50bn worth of Bitcoin. In absolute terms, Chia is relatively minor. “Instead of just wasting electricity, Chia chews through SSDs at a fantastic rate, and also has thoroughly wrecked the market for big HDs.” “Chia claims to do decentralisation just like bitcoin: waste some resource as unfakeable proof that you are claiming a share of the winnings,” Gerard says. The problem is particularly acute for SSDs, which have a limited number of uses before they break. Prices for both types of drive have noticeably gone up in the past week, according to David Gerard, a cryptocurrency expert and author of Libra Shrugged. Most affected have been large hard drives, which are used to store the random numbers, and a specific type of solid-state drive (SSD) called an NVMe drive, which is used to generate the random numbers. That, plus the skyrocketing value of the cryptocurrency, has led to huge demand for the specific types of hard drive that work best with the system.

It aims to improve on more popular cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum by removing the incentives to burn massive amounts of electricity.īut Chia’s replacement for bitcoin’s energy-intensive “proof of work” system, called “proof of space and time”, instead requires users to devote massive amounts of hard drive space to generating and storing random numbers, with rewards doled out to those with the most space used up. A new cryptocurrency is being blamed for shortages of hard drives and other storage systems, as speculatorsbuy up critical components in anticipation of a price rise.Ĭhia is the creation of Bram Cohen, the entrepreneur behind the BitTorrent file-sharing system.

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