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 .

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 .