Today the Chia Network has crossed 10 Exabytes, or 10 000 Petabytes, or 10 000 000 Terabytes, of network space plotting and farming for Chia. This netspace explosion has happened far faster than anticipated and is simply incredible to watch.
Try and picture even 1 exabyte. That is 1000 Petabytes. At normal datacenter density, one petabyte will take up between 8 and 16 rack units of space, leading you to get between 2 and 4 into a standard rack with power, networking and compute. You can get denser, but it becomes far costlier and difficult to manage. So with even 4PB in a single rack, to get to 1 exabyte you will need 250 full deployed racks of storage, each costing around $250 000 without paying salaries, or rent, or power and cooling.
As an enterprise architect with a good sense of how much storage that really is, it is difficult to fathom how fast this storage has been attached to a distributed network. Well done, Chia team.
What’s your take on where this will go? Another 10x by the end of the year?
I dont know. I think it is going to start slowing down soon as the space already allocated gets plotted out and people are looking at new investment.