This seems astounding to me - a provider already with 150PB sitting idle couldn’t figure out how to do this profitably and if the price dips or the network keeps growing, it flat out starts costing them money in a number of months.
Even after the space was plotted and overhead was nada - I figured Backblaze would be ALL OVER something like Chia, just keeping the drives online, full of plots and wiping them right before deploying them to production as a hot swap - how is that not the perfect passive income use case for a storage provider?
I have to imagine that is why the netspace has grown so much more than any other storage coin - this must be what ever provider is doing. Like renting idle used cars sitting in your car lot.
How is that not appealing to them?
They are a smart team - and the fact it doesn’t make sense for them makes me feel blind thinking I might have some appreciable ROI for anything less than 100 PB on my own…
Individual plotting/storage costs are far less than whales. Whale’s ‘free storage’ isn’t free. Staff, rent, equipment to maintain isn’t cheap. Solo farmers use existing (or at least paid for) equipment. My PC is on 7/24 anyway nowadays. It can farm and do minor maintenance plotting without breathing hard, with little to no additional cost to me.
Personally, I hope this story and the facts get around and the whales jump ship & go in search of another quick buck, not XCH. Leave the Netspace now and let us have the rewards. Bye Bye.
But these are all costs already incurred - BB has 150 PB of idle/online drives sitting in pools waiting to be hot-swapped into action upon active drive failure… SURELY filling them with plots and letting them be farmed while they sit idle is appreciably more income than… not doing it?
Sorry I should have clarified, I’m not comparing BB to a person with a gaming PC with 2-4 hard drives in it… I’m comparing BB to a (moron?) like myself that dropped $10k on a 0.25PB home setup in hopes that the monthly income might be worth it.
What you are describing (idle space on a normal workstation/PC/etc.) will never make up the majority of the netspace regardless of what the hopes and dreams of Chia were meant to be - if XCH is worth anything, money follows money and well-funded individuals will contribute PBs of space. If XCH is worthless, then they will drop out and it won’t make any sense for you/me/any normal person to plot and farm with our tiny TBs of space anyway.
There is an edge case scenario here where the netscape gets so small (say 1PB) where our TBs mean something - but that’s impossible at this point… if the netscape goes from EXABYTES back to PBs then that means the coin has collapsed and everyone is bailing.
There is no recovery from that (crypto-nomically speaking).
I have from Drive A, B, D, E, till Y (only Z is left on purpose) + 4 folder drives 01, 02, 03, 04 (coz run out of letters). On the residential space, that is my max that I’m willing to tackle with. Mine is real home-brew, no disk caddy, no server, just a mining PC on the task.
Rkalla > I was NOT referring to the person with the 2-3 HDs on a gaming PC either. Rather the u and me type with a modest investment (unlike some, I don’t consider it a gambling wager expecting a quick return). E.g., I have only 1100 plots, with 300 left to fill. Those fixed costs are already covered, like housing, personal labor, SSDs, CPUs, disks, etc, are paid for. No more costs necessary other than electricity to farm. Just sit nearly idle and hope the investment appreciates. Like buying stock in the stock market, but not trying to be a day trader.
Alternatively an entity with 150PiB of disks has significant running costs that need to be funded on an ongoing basis…rent, taxes, staff, upkeep, etc. Or to quote them, “At $5/TB/month, 150PB costs $175,000 per week”. And storage sitting ‘free’ is not computing power, so a BB has that not insignificant cost (SSDs, CPU cycles, power). It all adds up, apparently more than you or I would ever imagine.
Even at today’s modest XCH price, and only after ~3 months, I’ve made made about 12% return on my investment. Not to shabby, considering, at that rate, I may have a ~45% ROI in a yr. Some ifs there, of course, but looking to be a decent return still. Again, conceptually, not much different from other investments I’ve made over my lifetime. I don’t need steady income, so no pools and their costs required.
I see what you are saying - I was looking past their quantification of “$5TB/mo” - thinking from the practical perspective of “the shit is sitting there, online, doing nothing… how could it NOT be better to have it doing something passively while we wait for hot-swap?”
Waaaaaiiiiiit wait wait… with ~1100 (soon to be 1400) plots you aren’t pooling and somehow still making income?
That was the running joke on here since I got involved with Chia - that even folks with 10k plots can’t make a dime because of the whales.
If you are that lucky to already have a 12% ROI, I need you to buy me some lottery tickets real quick…
I can only say I’ve tried to plot in a pure, simple way. I’ve watched many flail about, worrying over their setups, changing things, reinstalling, adjusting, forks, powershell this and that, madmax, etc. Me, I just carefully plot away, whilst having a bunch of fun, built a workhorse TR setup, watched how it works, and maximized what I have. Nothing too fancy, little in the way of frills. I know it works, because it’s stock. And to confirm that, I got another 2x XCH a couple days ago, actually almost right on the schedule. Easy on the nerves too. And what a joyous surprise when those XCH show up!
Just read this article and BackBlaze calculated their costs based on what they charge for storage. $5/TB/month. They had the 150 PB at $175k/week. The Chia winnings at $250k/week based on $500ish/XCH. For them it might not make sense, maybe they don’t feel the cost of plotting stacks up, and they aren’t set up for it, maybe their machines aren’t primarily for processing, though I’m sure they can crunch a few hashes/second.
Clearly Bones has nailed it, for a data centre to do Chia farming as a way to use unused machinery, they have to be able to quantify the ROI not take a bit of a gamble on it. Shareholders aren’t going to go for “we lost $400k gambling on Chia” though they would be happy if it was “We ‘invested’ in Chia and made $400k”.
Most of us are people who either have a decent PC or two for gaming or whatever and have turned it to this, or have some servers either as a homelab or similar, or have taken it as an educational exercise to learn some server stuff, which is what I’ve done. All of these cases are taking a gamble on Chia being a bigger thing in the future than it is now.
I am intensely comfortable with Backblaze not getting into Chia.
