What is Chia Coin and how does the cryptocurrency causing SSD / HDD shortage?

 

If you are minimally interested in the world of cryptocurrencies, you have surely heard in recent weeks about Chia Coin and the SSD / HDD shortage problems it is causing, but what exactly is it and how does it work?

Like Bitcoin or Ethereum, Chia Coin is another cryptocurrency, although it has an important peculiarity, and that is that graphics cards or specialized ASIC units are not used to mine it , but all the work falls on the storage units.

The mining of this cryptocurrency does not occur by solving complex operations, but is completed by storing its blockchain and transactions. However, it must be clarified that the most important thing to mine Chia Coin is the capacity and not so much the performance . The speed of the SSDs can present a great benefit when creating the partitions on the faster hard disk, but it will be the capacity of the latter that will give us the greatest profit, thanks to the fact that they will allow us to store more information from the blockchain and the transactions.

What advantages does it have?

Thus, the differences with Bitcoin, for example, are clear: Instead of solving equations and mining, what is done with Chia Coin is known as agriculture , since the faster someone can store files and the more they can store, the greater it will be the possibility of obtaining the reward.

In this way, ChiaCoin has some key advantages over Bitcoin, the main one being with respect to the environment (it is more ecological since the units consume much less energy). It is also supposed to be more secure, stable, and viable than Bitcoin and Ether, both of which tend to be very volatile.

Forecasts suggest that Chia could enter the cryptocurrency trading market on May 3. As a result of all this is that there is a shortage of SSDs and high-capacity HDDs , causing a price increase of up to 66% in some units. We will see if all this ends in a bubble pricking or if it really will come to stay.

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