Chia Coin Miners Are Reselling Used SSDs as New
What people who read this article may not realize is that this is the Chia incentive model actually working properly.  It is not cost effective to buy new hard drive equipment to farm(mine) Chia.  (This was well discussed by Chia Network and the community before mainnet launch)  Chia is really designed to be used to farm existing available storage space that people or companies already have for other purposes.  For example, a home NAS system that may currently only be using a small portion of it's capacity.  People can then slowly fill that space overtime and potentially make some money from their unused space.<p>The only time it made sense to buy new equipment to try to plot really quickly, was right at the start before Netspace increased.  Chia now has somewhere on the order of 300,000 - 400,000 full nodes operating on the network (already making it more decentralized than Bitcoin) and is approaching 36EiB of space.  The "green" benefit of Chia is that you don't throw away the proofs that get generated like you do with Bitcoin mining and instead you can keep them for many years and potentially decades.  This is where a lot of the power savings come from.  Take a look at <a href="https://chiapower.org/" rel="nofollow">https://chiapower.org/</a> to understand the power usage compared to existing cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.