Backblaze estimates Chia mining profitability

The cloud service Backblaze has performed подсчеты, according to which even when using free disk space, mining the Chia cryptocurrency would become unprofitable by the fourth month.

Backblaze factored in its spare disk space totaling 150 petabytes and estimated its weekly revenue from mining Chia at $250,000.

Analysts noted that to create a large number of plots for the Chia cryptocurrency, multi-core high-performance processors and a large amount of RAM are required.

“Even with enterprise-grade solid-state drives, no upfront costs, and a stable price for Chia, weekly mining revenues would be virtually zero by week 16 due to the continually rising mining difficulty,” Backblaze said.

The company also calculated the maintenance costs of the equipment assuming a standard rate of $5 per month per 1 TB of disk space. Maintaining disks with a total capacity of 150 petabytes costs $175,000 per week.

“With exponential growth in difficulty, costs would exceed Chia mining revenue within seven weeks. With a steady growth, maintenance costs would exceed revenue by around week 28, after which the operation would run at a loss,” according to the experts.

The calculations used a Chia price of $584.6, current at the start of last month. As of writing, the cryptocurrency trades around $260.

As of now, according to Chia Explorer, the network space stands at 36.5 exabytes — more than 2.2 million 16 TB HDDs.

Earlier in June, Backblaze announced a cloud mining service for Chia, though experts doubted its profitability.

What is Chia Network (CHIA)?

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