So I have around 700TB of plots, more than 50% were allocated to pooling. After a month, I made around 1.8 XCH with the pool and my old OG plots made 6 XCH. Now I agree this can be coincidence but after a few months now, I have a good feeling about when I should win 2XCH and it’s actually happened quite reliably. With the pool, I am not so sure. I can see the hourly and daily XCH payout and I am by no means suggesting that spacepool is doing anything fishy (they can’t really, anyway), plus I love their community.
However self-pooling has gotten me a lot more XCH over time and while I can’t explain it, I thought I’d share with the community to hear what everyone else thinks.
One of the reasons might be that I can see the “plot estimate” varying quite dramatically with space pool, something I think I can avoid by self-plotting. Plus, I don’t really need the “daily payout” feeling with my farm, I actually like the feeling of waking up to see another 2 XCH in the bank
With 700 TiB, I think solo farming is a good option in any case. Especially while the netspace seems to have levelled out for the time being.
You numbers are really weird though.
assuming a 50/50 split for the moment,
your pool payout seems low for 350+ TiB, it should have been around the 2.5 mark
Your solo luck on the other hand is awesome as it is almost 2.5x over expected win rate.
So from that, the conclusion is: insufficient data.
I just think that with there kind of numbers, you need a longer period of time to make any sort of conclusion.
I can’t really imagine your luck will hold out to the extend that you keep winning 2x or more over the average. Should even out in the long run. Keep testing it will be very useful data after 6 months or so.
It feels nice when you are lucky while solo farming, but when you are unlucky it feels horrible. Thoughts starts creeping in to your mind: “is something wrong with my setup?” and the fun part with being lucky for a while might get downweighed by the “uneasy” feeling of being very unlucky. Just imagine yourself closing in on ~400-500% of your expected time to win without any XCH rewards - how would you feel? That type of scenario is likely going to happen with your solo adventure sooner or later, so it might be good to stay prepared for it if you decide to go totally solo for a while. Farming in a pool is predictable and boring, but it is much easier to stay focused on other things in life rather than the health of your chia farm. That is my 2 cents on this topic after approaching 5 months on this chia journey.
Thanks for your thoughts. Yeah, it’s more like 60/40 for the pooled vs OG plots but I agree I’ve been quite lucky. Usually every two weeks my solo-farmed plots had a win. The pooled plots on the other hand, well, it feels very slow…
I’ll follow your advice on observing this but for now, I have moved everything back to solo-farming, let’s see!
Thanks for your view. I’ve also been doing this for 5 months and I’ve not really done much with my farm other than having three four machines plot to get to where I am… In my first month, I got luck and since then, every month I had 2 XCH until I got to around 250 TB when the frequency slightly decreased. So all in all, I’m happy with my farm, I have a lot of monitoring in place to avoid something going wrong and me not noticing. I can comfortable say I spend less than an hour a week monitoring my farm - with or without pool… most time is really spent on updating the chia versions on the main node…
yeah, fully aware. I haven’t won a single (!) block with them in one month and with nearly 300 TB of plots… my solo farming plots have won 4 XCH in the same time… Luck? probably… but still.
