Zephyrnet Logo

Decentralized Markets Are Springing Up All Around Us & It’s Great

Date:

I became a proud Chia farmer a few weeks back, and… that’s probably one of the weirder sentences I’ll ever write, honestly.

For those who don’t know (which is still most people, I’m guessing), Chia is a new, recently released eco-friendly blockchain and a greener alternative to energy-intensive cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It was created by Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, so it has real potential I think.

I first heard about it on Kevin Rose’s new podcast, Modern Finance, which is a topic I’ve been diving deeper into lately. I’ve long been a fan of the nostalgia market and particularly sports cards as investments but I’m just now getting into things like cryptocurrencies and NFTs. “Why not?” is what I say.

Anyway, when I heard all one needed to do to “farm” Chia coin was set up a few digital plots on some empty hard drive space, I said sure and navigated over to Amazon to purchase a five terabyte external hard drive. Then, I installed Chia’s software, connected my “full node” to its “mainnet,” and several hours later (basically a full night), everything was synced.

My Chia farming dashboard

Life on my Chia farm is hilariously hopeful.

Here’s the funny thing I discovered: creating plots tends to take several hours as well, especially since I’m just rocking a simple laptop configuration with an external hard drive plugged in via USB. Even I know a desktop rig with an internal solid-state drive would be a much better setup.

When I finished my first plot, the “Expected Time to Win” Chia literally said “1 year,” which was equal parts bummer and hilarious to me. I could only laugh; I knew full well I didn’t really know what I was doing. But a single plot only takes up a little over a hundred gigabytes of hard drive space, so I figured it was no big deal. I guess I’ll just make more and see!

Two weeks later, I now have 10 Chia plots to my name. The “Expected Time to Win” has already been reduced to a mere “3 months” as a result. And while I’d hate to keep my new hard drive spinning all day and night, I’m also excited about the prospects of what 30, 40, or even 50 plots might bring.

Mind you, as Chia continues to grow in popularity, “Expected Time to Win” will only continue to increase. It’s based on your percentage share of the overall network space, and I currently own just 0.0002%. All it would take is steady growth and the network’s size would blow right past my little hard drive’s capabilities — or so I think.

I don’t know any of this for sure, of course, which is part of the excitement for me. And whether I earn any Chia this way or not, I feel like I’ll be walking away with a much better understanding of cryptocurrencies.

Regardless of what does or doesn’t happen, this has been a really fun experiment for me. It’s not something I think I’ll regret, even if it doesn’t “net” me anything. It’s just cool to feel like part of this community.

Here’s what else I’ve come to realize in recent days…

Chia, as a project, has technically been around for about three years now, but its mainnet only recently launched about a month ago:

The aptly named green paper Chia’s creators released details the new “consensus algorithm” the whole thing runs on, called Proofs of Space and Time, or simply “PoST.”

“PoST replaces the Proof of Work which wastes massive amounts of energy and is less secure against mining centralization.”

As someone who loves diving into new platforms and technologies, I can’t help but be excited about the prospects Chia brings. To me, the green aspect alone is a noble effort worth supporting, but PoST feels like a solid evolution over the various crypto proofs that came before it as well.

It also looks like I’m anything but alone. Just today, I saw a news story citing Chia as the driving force behind a recent spike in hard drive sales in Southeast Asia, so even a month in, the project’s already gaining steam.

Being at the forefront of a potentially game-changing project or technology is inherently exciting. You never know what it might turn into until one day when it does.

On another episode of Kevin Rose’s podcast, the founders of the original NFT art project, CryptoPunks, were on talking about their project’s origin story and subsequent rise. They detailed how it all started as a fun experiment that didn’t really take off right away. They even gave away a lot of the original “punks” for next to nothing. Now, today, the lowest-priced punk will run you about 40 grand and some have even sold for millions already.

In my opinion, these types of projects command attention, interest, and money for two relatively simple reasons: (1) they’re historic in that they often involve a technological first of some kind, and (2) they relate to a consumer’s sense of personal identity.

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://medium.com/the-ascent/decentralized-markets-are-springing-up-all-around-us-its-great-203762778c87?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency

spot_img

Latest Intelligence

spot_img