he arrival of Chia on the mainstream media radar brought with it some challenging and interesting questions here at Backblaze. As close followers of the hard drive market, we were at times intrigued, optimistic, cautious, concerned, and skeptical—often all at once. But, our curiosity won out. Chia is storage-heavy. We are a storage company. What does this mean for us? It was something we couldn’t ignore.

Backblaze has over an exabyte of data under management, and we typically maintain around three to four months worth of buffer space. We wondered—with this storage capacity and our expertise, should Backblaze farm Chia?

For customers who are ready to farm, we recently open-sourced software to store Chia plots using our cloud storage service, Backblaze B2. But deciding whether we should hop on a tractor and start plotting ourselves required a bunch of analysis, experimentation, and data crunching—in short, we went down the rabbit hole.

After proving out if this could work for our business, we wanted to share what we learned along the way in case it was useful to other teams pondering data-heavy cloud workloads like Chia.

Ron Coleman
@RonColeman
Today the New York Supreme Court dismissed the "toddlers meme" lawsuit for "misappropriation" against our client Carpe Donktum (Logan Cook) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l1kM8lGbFJh-eUWKJLD0eQSmyd83GA4V/view?usp=drivesdk

Harmeet K. Dhillon
@pnjaban
·
Jul 9, 2021
Congratulations to my @dhillonlaw partner @RonColeman for defeating the lawsuit brought against client Logan Cook aka Carpe Donktum and 45 over the infamous toddler video, commentary upon which is a matter of public interest! Congrats to President Trump as well! #FirstAmendment