I’m in farming with 3 plots of about 100GB each one (on SSD), and I’ve joined to Pool about 2 weeks ago.
Now, I’m farming in a firewalled network (so no ports opened). I have a chance to win till 72 years!
So, does I made some mistakes?
3 K32 plots is just a start and 72 years to win for 3 plots sounds about right.
At this time you need to have over 200 K32 plots to get your time to win to under a year.
I know the initial hype was about filling in extra, unused space with Chia plots, but the reality is that you must dedicate at least 100TB to Chia plots to really get into the game.
Your firewall is also an issue. You must have port 8444 open. If you checked on both security checkboxes (two checks, two times) on Chia installation then Chia has already bypassed your firewall and you are ok, but if not, the Chia GUI will not be able to function.
Be well.
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So, today is not convenient farming chia, isn’t it?
IMOP, at this point in time if your not willing to bet at least $5000 (less if using some gear you already have), and its a bet not an investment, then Chia is probably not for you.
If the numbers do not get worse (who knows?) then you might hope for an 80% ROI in 5 years on a $5000 bet. I and many others hope that the numbers get better and turn our hobbies into small gold mines but the odds are high.
You can pool a few plots and earn small amounts of XCH for fun. If you do have more extra space, and/or scrounge up and install a couple more HDDs then you could earn a dribble of XCH pooling.
Farming is fun for me. I get to use my brain more often and who knows? In five years my farming bet/game may well become a useful income stream.
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Chia’s network space is growing. So your 72 years will likely change to over 100 years, in a few weeks, if you do not add more plots.
At this point, even 1,000 plots will take months (at this point in time). If you stop at 1,000 plots, then that eventually 1,000 plots will take nearly a year for a win, etc.
The winners are the folks that got in very early, and the hard drive manufacturers and resellers.
Actually the good news is that Chia netspace has actually dropped recently. With the price drop of Chia and the Chinese crypto ban most commercial investment in Chia farming has stopped.
I expect netspace to grow quite slowly for the near future, at least. In future I see netspace starting to rise sharply again only if XCH’s price and therefor farming rewards justify further investment.
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Chia netspace will likely change relative to the price over the next few years. But there will likely be delays in increasing it due to the time for plotting.
I do not keep track of the netspace figure from week to week. So I assumed that it kept growing, because every time I watch the value in the GUI, I see it creep upwards – never downwards.
So I guess it must have had some significant drops, and then goes back to creeping upwards, again?
As far as I saw, it peaked around 40 EiB, then dropped to about 35-36 EiB for a while and now, in about the last week its been chilling around 34 EiB.
More of a leveling, but definitely a slight drop. We peaked at just over 37,000 PiB and have now dropped just under 35,000.
With the crazy shark tooth in the netspace chart it has always been hard to nail down, but if you look at the log view and/or curve through the teeth of the linear view you can see that we levelled at around 36,000 PiB and for the first time in Chia history, actually dropped a little.
Hopefully, there will be less demand for high capacity drives, which will hopefully translate into lower prices.
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Already happening. 
I want to buy two 16TB drives next month to fill my third array and think I will have little problem finding a good deal. 
I check:
– amazon
– bestbuy
– bhphotovideo
– centralcomputer
– microcenter
and
– provantage
Am I missing any other sites that I should be checking?
Where do you check?
(I stopped checking newegg, because I never saw a good deal on their site)
You could farm a small number of plots like 3, but you have to consider it like a lottery ticket. Very unlikely to win, but you have to buy one to have a chance. If you have a machine that is always on and always connected then it doesn’t use all that many resources to run a farmer and farm a bit of formerly empty space.
If you win then, happy days, you just got (at current prices $350) easily worth it, if you have an always-on machine anyway (or a raspberry pi farming a few plots).
If you want to see a bit more of a return then you will need a fair bit of kit.
Buy secondhand then you can liquidate the equipment if you decide to give up or move on to something else. Your only sunk cost is electricity. This makes even more sense as a way to turn some excess solar energy into cash.
Netspace is dropping but I do not fully share Apsy68’s assessment. This makes it easier to win XCH but means that confidence in the project has decreased somewhat.
to be honest join chia with 3 plots is a waste of time, unless you are doing this for fun. My recommendation is that join a pool and at least you will get some rewards. I think as the user @Aspy68 mention right now 200 plots to one year is how is today,