Hard drives out of stock? Welcome to the era of big speculation

"Thanks to Cyberpunk 2077, which is buggy but I bought RTX 3080 a year ago and now it's double the price. Thanks to 2077 for helping me manage my money."

A Steam player's message at the bottom of the game "Cyberpunk 2077" was copied and pasted by countless people and spread to various social platforms. The players smiled at each other. They knew that this was a satirical comment on the wildly rising graphics card prices for six months in a row. A tech industry event turned into a social one, with prices of graphics cards remaining stubbornly out of stock in the secondary market due to a combination of low production capacity and high demand.

Now, it is the turn of the hard drive began to be out of stock, is the hard drive that we use to store pictures and movies, actually also started to be fired.

The hard disk price in hard disk seller mouth is like a stock, change hard disk price for many times a day, the price of every hour hard disk is different, every time quote has the period of validity of one hour only even. Users on Weibo and Jike began taking screenshots lamenting that hard drives were no longer affordable. Those who had sold graphics cards began to sell hard drives on the side.

Some say the root cause of all this is a new cryptocurrency project called "Chia", for a single reason: Chia requires mining with hard drives.

On Douyin, a video about Chia hard disk mining has easily earned 100,000 thumb up. On the Baidu index, the keyword search volume of Chia has risen sharply since April. People in the circle of friends who used to pull heads as a community started talking about forming groups to dig Chia; Even Hikvision, an A-share listed company with A market capitalisation of $500bn, has issued A statement saying its monitoring hard drives are not suitable for mining.

Encryption industry practitioners feeling, "the whole world, in the P disk".

But Blockbeats combed through the hard drive hype path and found that it's not simply supply and demand that's driving up prices. Behind the price rise of hard disks is a microcosm of the secondary market sentiment, a projection of anxiety in the era of big speculation.

Hard disk mining tells a good story

Of course, hard disk mining does tell a good story, it can be popular, things happen for a reason.

Those of you who know about Bitcoin have more or less heard the idea that Bitcoin consumes energy. Bitcoin converts the consumption of electricity into computing power, mining bitcoin, quite a power consumption.

According to the University of Cambridge, Bitcoin's power consumption recently hit an all-time high of 12.9 billion kilowatt-hours, or 0.59 percent of global power consumption.

You don't have a clue what that number is, but 12.9 billion kilowatt-hours is the 34th most energy-consuming country in the world, more than countries like Ukraine and Argentina consume in a year.

As a result, we have seen various criticisms of Bitcoin as a waste of resources, most notably from Bill Gates.

That's what Chia cuts, so instead of wasting resources, it uses hard disk space.

It was created in 2017 by Bram Cohen. The name of the project is largely unknown, but those who have used BitTorrent or ThunderThunder will know about BitTorrent, the protocol that used to account for 60% of global Internet traffic. Bram is the founder of BitTorrent.

So here we have all the ingredients for a good story.

With a top institution in hand and a world-renowned founder, the concept of "green bitcoin" hit the weakness of Bitcoin directly, combined with the super bull market of cryptocurrency, and with the expectation that "digging Chia is digging early bitcoin", the story of Chia landed.

Everybody's betting on one thing, that the Chia tokens that they dig up will skyrocket.

The movement Blockbeats has seen the OTC price of the Chia token XCH rise from $40 all the way to $100. It asked Nan Jiao, an active investor involved in the OTC purchase of XCH in the community, and found that XCH is currently not tradable, but only circulating in the pit. The price of XCH varies across different social platforms and even among different groups. "I've made a lot of money by buying low and selling high among the groups, using mine pools as a third party intermediary."

The price is too high to buy, what to do? Digging bitcoin costs electricity. Digging Chia consumes hard disk. Hard disk becomes a resource and also a consumable.

Open hard disk mining before the need for P disk. P-plot, or Plot, is also known as plotting or sowing. During the p-disk phase, the hard disk will write encrypted data. In the process, a lot of data will be generated, and we found the official advice of CHIA, which says to use fast write solid state drives (SSDs) for the cache disk and mechanical hard drives (HDDs) for the final file storage disk. According to the Rhythm BlockBeats test, a minimum file (about 101 GB) requires about 2TB of data to be written into the cache disk. The amount of 2TB data is equivalent to about 300 HD movies (1080P) that you normally watch.

However, writing large amounts of data will greatly shorten the life of the hard disk.

Chia mining is not really the reuse of idle hard drives that we use. A 1TB Samsung 970 EVO, for example, can only produce 30TB final files over its theoretical lifetime.

Looking at the current CHIA computing power, we find that the entire network has 413 petabytes of computing power. If you convert 413 petabytes to a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO hard drive, that's about 42,300 hard drives that are exhausted.

P disk in addition to the consumption of hard disk, but also need a lot of time, measured P 101 GB files need at least 7 hours.

Rhythm Blockbeats conducted the Chia mining test on March 26, when the 101.4GB plot file took 10 months to mine a block. Now on April 19, the 101.4GB plot file takes up to three years to dig up a single block.

For the miners, early to buy hard disk early P disk, early P disk early block, time is money. This is one reason why so many miners buy so many hard drives at no cost for a short period of time.

The wealth effect occurs, and market sentiment accelerates, and as a result, hard drives do rise.

All hard drives above 4TB are out of stock, while spot prices have risen more than 50 per cent from last week's lows.

Western Data red 12TB price trend

Western Digital Red 12TB is currently priced at 3499 yuan on JD.com, but it is not available. On Taobao, the spot price has risen to 11,659 yuan.

Western Digital red 12TB spot price

High capacity and high performance hard drives are not for the average user, so why is all the social media talking about price hikes for hard drives?

Old news new fry, hard disk mining has been the concept of 3 years ago

Chia has a good story, but it's not a leader. In hard drive mining, the recognized leader is a project called Filecoin, a top capital endorsement, a well-known concept, a king project, the 17th largest cryptocurrency project in the world, hard drive mining is the absolute leader.

Filecoin hard disk miners have been on sale since 2018. According to incomplete estimates, there are 200-300 companies selling Filecoin miners in Huaqiang North. Because Filecoin is so popular, real and fake mining machines are all over the market.

According to media reports, a company called "Snail Miner" sold nearly 300,000 fake Filecoin mining machines in a five-month period, generating nearly 2 billion yuan in sales.

We also have a look at the size of the Filecoin mining market, which is expected to generate around 20 billion RMB in sales in 2020.

Viewed from the browser, Filecoin has 4.41 exabytes of real storage space on the entire network. That's more than 10 times the available storage space on Chia's entire network. Even without counting that number, Filecoin's millions of fake miners have far more capacity than Chia's entire network's real storage space.

The problem is that the popularity of Filecoin hasn't caused the hard drive industry to run out of stock, raise prices, and hype.

Why could one Chia change the hard drive industry?

Is the two mining principle is different, but the essence is to use hard disk, fake mining machine is also need to have a hard disk, tap does not have the influence, why a CHIA has such a large energy?

In other words, who is driving up the price of hard drives?

In a search of BlockBeats, I found a map of the Blockchain Summit agenda, in which Seagate's senior engineers were listed.

It is no coincidence that in early 2020, Seagate China Channel Senior Director, Senior Manager, Senior Storage Solutions Expert and South China Key Account Manager visited Star Land and said that they would cooperate on products and technology.

Starcontinent is a company founded in 2018 to focus on Filecoin (IPFS) mining. In the world of hard drive mining, Star Land is the Bitcontinent of Bitcoin mining.

Hard disk out of stock price is the manufacturer of a Yang?

Nvidia, for example, wants to harvest gamers without giving up the mining market. After the launch of RTX 3060, found that the graphics card market premium is not much, they "accidentally" leaked the full speed of the graphics card driver mining. It's all about the players, but it's all about the miners.

However, hard disk is not graphics card, technical content is not high, more shipments, some consumer products have been able to achieve domestic replacement. According to TrendFocus, a total of 330 million SSDs will be shipped in 2020, with a total storage capacity of 27 exabytes. Seagate shipped a total of 259 million mechanical hard disks, of which 110 million were shipped, with a total storage capacity of 1,018 exabytes, 2,524 times that of the current CHIA network.

Seagate is only one of the manufacturers with large shipments in the hard disk market. The price of Amazon, which can provide direct mail to China, is still within a reasonable range, and it has become the first choice for some players and miners.

If it is not for manufacturers to sell hunger marketing, so where are the hard disk?

The player eventually becomes a dragon

At the end of March, Lulu purchased two Seagate Coldfish 4TB hard disks for testing Chia mining at a price of 559 yuan. However, the hard drive is priced at more than 1,000 yuan on different social media.

Source: weibo and jike users

Meanwhile, when Rhydou asked about the "Asus flagship store" priced at 1,199 yuan, the reply was "market reasons".

Hard drive price increases may have nothing to do with Chia, and hard drive manufacturers. Ordinary consumers do not know mining or the hard disk market, and driven by KOL and social media sentiment, they generally believe that hard disks are about to be out of stock and prices are about to skyrocket. Some businesses to raise prices, homeopathy cut leeks. Unaware of the truth, the people began to hoard hard drives. What the hard disk mining market lacks is larger capacity, such as mechanical hard disks above 8T and solid state drives with high TBW, rather than common consumer products. Most products used by ordinary consumers are not suitable for hard disk mining.

The end result is that KOLs get more traffic, consumers spend more money to buy products, manufacturers sell more products, and miners get more attention for their tokens. In the end, it seems, everyone except the average consumer won.

Perhaps, as Jionan said, the price of the Chia token is like a blind box, and only the moment it is opened can the mood of the hard drive market be stopped.

Electronic products early to buy early to enjoy, after buying to enjoy the discount has become an ideal state. The sound of getting rich early has drowned out the sound of reason. As fry hard disk game player said, missed the memory skyrocketing, missed the graphics card skyrocketing, you still want to miss the hard disk skyrocketing?

It is the Chinese themselves that have prevented them from buying hard drives. Gamers have finally become their most hated scalpers.

Remember that hard drive we bought and listed on social media for $1,000? At the time of this press release, the "Seagate Jingdong flagship store" is still available for 609 yuan, with next-day delivery service available in some cities.

Era of great speculation

COVID-19 at the end of 2019 was a turning point. It was the first global crisis that humanity faced once it had enough to eat. Physical pain, palpitations, depression, and chronic fatigue may remain with some patients for the rest of their lives.

At the beginning of the epidemic, mask manufacturers were accused of becoming a national financial crisis, and the purchase of masks returned to the era of human society. All these have led to a rethink of wealth and health.

Everything that can carry anxiety about wealth has soared, including cryptocurrencies, Tesla, Moutai, and even shoes, graphics cards, and hard drives.

Back at the height of Filecoin's popularity, it was hard for most to imagine that a wave of emotion could explode the market, but memories of memory and graphics card price hikes are too vivid for users, and today the market price for graphics cards is still three times the official price. Whether is the price reasonable already unimportant, the shoe with low cost and technological requirement can skyrocket with all sorts of names, what's more, does the hard disk that still needs dot threshold?

It no longer matters whether cryptocurrencies can change the world.

Almost no native cryptocurrency practitioners or investors have bought Doge. What they care about and like more is a valuable and cool product. However, Elon Musk has led the huge buying of Dogecoin by users outside the cryptocurrency community, and its market capitalization has exceeded $50 billion, making it the fifth largest among all crypto assets.

Ironically, Dogecoin was created to mock and parody cryptocurrencies.

Obviously, the pan-melting of the whole society is inevitable, and we will usher in a new era.   Like the sexual revolution in the United States after World War II, Gen Z-ers after the new era are more opportunistic, and there is a widespread belief that everything can be traded, and that only by doing so can they generate more wealth.

Finally, welcome to the era of big speculation.

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