Isn’t this a fundamental issue with crypto though? If it’s easy then everyone can do it and will do it, and it becomes impossible for the small guys, it’s a tool to make the rich richer but sold as a way to bring financial freedom and equality to all.
Take something real world, like being a taxi driver, there are barriers to entry, you need to be an adult, have a license, a taxi license, a car or the use of one, know your way around and how to do the job. The earnings are reasonable but you jumped over all those hurdles and use up your time.
Crypto has relatively few barriers to entry, you can be 11 years old with a computer and an internet connection, the ‘work’ isn’t human effort at all, after some initial setup. The reward is either worth very little or worth an insane amount, but this has nothing to do with the effort used and everything to do with speculation and hype.
AFAIK, Ethereum avoided Bitcoin’s ASIC fate because the algorithm depends on lots of RAM. ASICS are good at processing stuff real fast, but if the algo needs lots of memory, then the ASIC would need lots of memory too and now you are cost-constrained again. BTC doesn’t need lots of RAM; ETH does.
GPUs have lots of cores and lots of RAM and are therefore perfect for mining ETH. In fact, the DAG (working set of memory) recently went over 4gb, which meant that only GPUs with more than 4gb RAM could mine. In Ethereum mining, you normally underclock your GPU and overclock your GPU RAM because the algo is so sensitive to RAM.
And yes, even after the recent crash, it is still incredibly profitable to mine ETH right now. My 8 GPU rig uses about $3 in electricity a day but mines about $30 in that same time right now. At the peak, it was over $60/day. You don’t need the latest GPUs, and in fact the older GPUs are more power efficient when you do the math. Unlike Bitcoin, you aren’t competing against custom ASICS - you are completing against the other poor slobs trying to find used $500 GPUs on FB Marketplace.
Isn’t this a fundamental issue with crypto though?
Yes it is, but with 1 fundamental difference:
it is so damned easy to farm Chia!
Everyone in the world can join to farm Chia, and potentially even your neighbour of 80 years old that own some free storage space and a laptop, can farm it someoday. With virtually no cost. Even the fkin 10 years old nerd kids with a gaming pc
That’s why this scenario is completely different from any other Crypto.
Pretty werid thinking. More risk = chance to do more profits. If price would drop to 1$ the ones with 40 TiBs would be less profitable, than the farmers with 10TiBs bro
That is inevitable - BTC saw 33k+ low today and the rate of decline is making that a reality… The crypto market is going to further worsen the recession…Monday morning, if Gold, Silver, precious metals start to rally, it will further accelerate the decline in crypto…
That’s why I am having a dabble with this, I’ve got a few pcs and old HDDs lying around. I was looking at a secondhand Dell server though on ebay. This is the thing though, isn’t it? Right now I’m torn between use whatever old kit is lying around, which was the spirit of chia and stop f**king about and buy some proper hardware, which is in essence why it is never going to be a thing for my 80 year old nieghbour to do.
Go recycled all the way! You can use your present day processor and nvmes to generate plots and park it all on recycled hardware… It’s a forever storage real estate…My recycled HP ZBook is generating 6/day, I have maxed out farmer capacity at 34-40tb…after that I stop on that solo farmer… I have a partnership rig which we will use to make a bigger storage (on recycled 6tb drives $14/tb here) , which we will reconfigure for ETH later…
In theory, yes. In practice, I see a lot more people failing to configure their setup in Chia than with any other GPU based crypto mining setup I’ve seen.
Bram said it on the Coindesk Podcast himself: Ultimately, there will be a few large datacenters that farm Chia. Start from Minute 20:00.
I directly quote his statement:
Today it might be profitable to purchase storage media in order to farm chia and get rewards for doing that. But I believe that longterm (might be like 6 months from now) this will be a VERY UNPROFITABLE thing to do. Because whats going to start happening, is that places that have huge amounts of storage, are going to start farming of that storage capacity and leveraging that already wasted ressources of which there is ludicrous amount of and thats where the eco-efficiency really comes in.
So back to the topic: A bad future scenario for small farmers. I dont think its a bad future. Its non existent, even with pools.
if any of the “logic” of this post was true… why would people mine ETH with a single GPU?
They are getting the tiniest payout compared to those big datacenters full of GPU’s
It works because of pools… just wait for official pools to come… see your XCH come in on the daily (yes a fraction, but is will add up over time).
with mining you get more of the thing no matter what, with farming you get an amount relative to others if 10 people got 10x more gpus they all get 10x the payout. and its not logic, its fact, the net growth increase and decrease payout for a set amount of plots would be directly relative one you ajust for price change in chia
to start now, it costs more in drives then you will make from rewards, if you already farmed 10 chia from months before it went public it doesnt count, you cant add something thats not in the equation and call it equal
and that is simply not the point, the point is if you and everyone like you all agreed on plotting one tenth of what you did, you would still be making the same exact amount of money but payed less in hardware so you still made more money. no one is saying it should be spread evenly instead of on the amount of space you put in, the point is you could maintain the same ratio with less drives. but if you keep getting greedy you will lead you and others to a point where you start making less money. and there is always a bigger fish who will outbid you
