Storage devices like HDDs and SSDs might go under stock shortages as a new Cryptocurrency is on the rise
Cryptocurrency miners have been buying high-end Graphics cards and CPUs in bulk for crypto mining, which had brought the stock of these graphics cards and CPUs to a halt, they are impossible to come by, and miners are a part of this along with scalpers. And now Storage drives are also under threat of being hard-to-buy items.
As there is a new cryptocurrency project called Chia, the brainchild of BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen. It is billed as a better blockchain and smart transaction platform which is decentralized, efficient, and secure, Chialisp, but it mined with unused storage space rather than graphics cards or specialized ASIC hardware.
Chia is built under a cryptographic technique called proof of space and time, it can be through as a way to prove that you have storage unused on your hard disk drive. Users of the Chia blockchain will seed unused space on their storage drives by installing software that stores a collection of cryptographic numbers on the disk into plots. The users are called Farmers, and they can scan their plots to see if they have the hash that is closest to the challenge. A farmer's probability of winning a block is the percentage of total space that a farmer has compared to the entire system, as explained by Chia's FAQ. And the proof of time is the time period elapsed between blocks.
So this is a new cryptocurrency that will be launched on 3rd May 2021, so its impact on the market will be seen shortly, storage devices, like SSDs and HDDs, will go out of stock, and the prices will also boom. In China, the prices of HDDs have boomed 67%, so it will have some impact on the market, still, it's unmeasurable how much of an impact it may have. If Chia becomes as big as bitcoin or etherium, it will affect HDD and SSD prices on a large scale all over the world.
In short none of it is good news for PC gamers or usual consumers.
According to Times Finance report, HDDs and SSDs are hard to come by because of resellers hoarding them so that they can be sold later during high demand. Chia's demand, combined with panic buying by resellers will allow companies like Seagate to clear inventory in the future, so the goal is to construct supplies now, before the cryptocurrency launches. And first prices of HDDs are expected to rise as SSDs wear out faster due to multiple writing and erasing operations, and once HDDs are out then SSDs will come under the same umbrella of being overpriced and out of stock. Well, that is if Chia works out and gets bigger.
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