Cryptocurrency miners in China are allegedly buying as many hard drives and SSDs as they can for the storage-based Chia cryptocurrency, a gold rush that could eventually drive the cost of storage upgrades in an iPhone or Mac up in the future.Gamers and computer users that rely on GPUs for tasks are currently dealing with a lack of supply for high-end graphics cards, driven by cryptocurrency miners buying all available stocks. However, one inbound cryptocurrency could cause similar issues for the storage market.Chia is a cryptocurrency that aims to offer a more energy-efficient way to farm the currency, by relying on the presence of unused hard drive capacity on computers rather than GPU-based calculations. The more unused storage a miner offers to "farm" for the currency as part of the network, the more the participant earns.Read more
