Paper Title: The Circular Drive Initiative - how Crypto can help Solve E-waste for Storage

Paper Abstract: The Circular Drive Initiative is a collaboration of global leaders in the ICT (Information and communications technology), sustainability, and blockchain in a joint effort designed to reduce e-waste by promoting and enabling the secure reuse of storage hardware. Today is common practice for storage devices to be destroyed “shredded” at the end of first use due to perceived security concerns. This is done by virtually everyone from hyperscale data centers, enterprise storage companies, and consumer drives from laptops and desktops. CDI aims to significantly reduce the number of disposed hard drives and e-waste by first eliminating data security risks for used drives and then scaling financially viable second-use business cases for drives. Modern drives have full self-encryption technologies and can perform a sanitize (securely wiping all the data, preventing access from even sophisticated methods of extraction). Storage based cryptocurrencies with proof of space and time like Chia are the perfect use case for used storage, as they do not store any user data and thus remove most of the reliability and durability requirements.

Paper Author: Jonmichael Hands, VP Storage, Chia Network

Author Bio: Jonmichael Hands partners with the storage vendors for Chia optimized product development, market modeling, and Chia blockchain integration. Jonmichael spent the last ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group working on product line management, strategic planning, and technical marketing for the Intel data center SSDs. In addition, he served as the chair for NVM Express (NVMe), SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SSD special interest group, and Open Compute Project for open storage hardware innovation. Jonmichael started his storage career at Sun Microsystems designing storage arrays (JBODs) and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines.