Yes, the pool assigns an adjusted difficulty to each farmer so they can prove they can beat that difficulty regularly and thus earn shares at a certain diff (“points”), that’s how they prove they have a certain farming capacity. This aspect is analogous to how PoW pools have always worked. Rewards are distributed according to each miner’s contribution to the pool, as measured by the shares (low diff blocks) they have submitted.
And yes, farmers are identified by their smart contract, and plots depend on the contract (you need the contract first to plot, these plots farm to the contract). The contract is unique in the blockchain (to change it the farmer destroys and recreates it). And block rewards can only be extracted towards the pool address specified in the contract.
Easy, by dropping the difficulty way down and counting the number of valid proofs found, aka “shares”, same as gpu mining. As soon as one of those submitted share difficulty’s exceed the actual block difficulty, voila proof found. FYI a gpu mining pool doesn’t know how many gpus you have either. It’s entirely based on the number of shares you submit proportional to everyone else.
Yes, see my last post in this thread. The thing I missed was difficulty could be used to lower the boundary for statistical fraud detection, so pools don’t need to know the size of your plot space, and can use the plenitude of positive responses as a difficult to fudge proxy.
No solution that “validates plots at the client side” is secure. It’s too easy to build your own client that simply lies about the validation. The pool will have to perform independent validation such as the proposed reduced difficulty challenges mentioned in other responses.
So pools will be sending out low difficulty challenges in addition to the mainnet challenges to assign rewards based on how many an account can complete a day. I’m definitely curious to hear what the performance difference of farming to pools vs solo will be. If it’s sending two or five times the number of challenges solo farming does that might be significant over years of drive use. I doubt that will matter to most farmers that are just looking to use pools to average out their short-term daily rewards. For me, the extremely low farming cost is the entire point of chia. Will pool plots be able to be solo farmed if someone wants to switch back to solo? It seems obvious that once pools do release there will be a very real plotting race until Netspace levels out.
It will make no difference to drive load as the relative farming load for low or high difficulty is slight. It only makes a difference if you have LOTS of SMALL drives and imagine you can spin them down because the chance of hitting a given drive is small enough to risk it.
However, the wear on drive startup is already too high with solo challenges and 3TB drives so a pooled check will definitely preclude spinning down … so the additional wear is negligible as you need to keep them spinning
Most of the drives i use are SAS, have been spinning continuously for 6-8 years - SMART shows me some have only spun up a handful of times over those years - If they have been running continuously and COOL for that long they are about as likely to fail as a consumer USB drive that was designed for access a few times a day and is still in its “early fail” window
Chia network is a creative and successful crypto coin. It wouldn’t be a surprise to encounter some challenges as always in a unchartered territory.
Saw people made an interesting comparison between validating a plot versus validating GPU/ASIC. I’d like to add my 2-cents.
I’d say YES and NO.
NO because GPUs are made by major corporations. Similarly, the ASIC mining box requires big investment, they are not motivated to fake ASIC in mass production. Plus, they aim to serve the open market.
In contrary, plots are made by individual Chia farmers. The entry of cheating is so much lower. Plus, there is no Big Brother watching.
However, I’d say YES in a sense from the pool’s operator point of view.
Actually in theory, GPU/ASIC could have been hacked to cheat out a pool if it’s economical to do so. For PoW based networks, the fake hardware could be made cheaper and consuming less electricity as long as a pool treated it as a real one and distributed payout.
A fake Plot serves a similar purpose in Chia pool has much lower barrier to enter. Their goal could be simple, fill a Chia pool with fake plots so that they could get a share of “time and storage” from the pool distribution. A plot could be faked in one of following ways:
(1) fake tables inside the Plot
(2) fake size of the Plot file
(3) fake the local farm environment
The (3) is possible given the size of 100+GB in each plot. The fake plot might contain a general purpose program to respond the challenges from the Chia pool.
Chia’s total capacity charts online seem indicating that fake plots are already in circulation. It’s attractive to some folks as long as such plots were quicker to create, or smaller in size.
Excellent post even if some of it went over my head, lol!
I do question one statement you made:
We have had a lot of discussion about those charts, the bumps and jumps, the saw tooth and more.
IMO the most important conclusion we came to was that the info for the graphs we see is gathered by different polling methods some of which are only done once a day. The graph keeps trying to fix itself. The numbers are not exact. The behaviors we see in the charts do not reflect reality except in a general fashion especially as you shorten the time frame.
With that said, do you have any other information to indicate that a significant number of fake plots are sneaking past the pools? I have read much speculation but have found no facts.
You the farmer cannot cheat pools on the protocol level
In theory the pool can implement the protocol wrong, or you can hack the pool server and give your self points etc. and you can cheat them that way.
Pools can cheat you the farmer out of rewards, that you by your points (participation) should get… by simply not paying you out… or recording less points than you should get for your participation.
How can a farmer not cheat a pool (official pool protocol)… because points are based on your plots passing the normal block-chain puzzle… but with a lower difficulty.
If your plots can solve this puzzle at lower difficulty then they can also solve it at higher difficulty (just less frequent) and win blocks… whos rewards go to the pool wallet via the pool NFT mechanism.
So the whole fake plots will cheat pools is nonsense. If that was possible then you’d cheat the block-chain difficulty puzzles with it and get straight up block rewards
a plot passing lower difficulty is the same k32 as one passing higher difficulty… That’s the point I’m making. There is no fake plot that can pass low only… as it would also pass high… That’s the math behind the block-chain of Chia…
The difficulty gets adjusted to ensure the number of blocks found in a day matches the 4608… but the plots at the start of mainnet with low difficulty are the same as those when the netspace is 100 ExaBytes with a much higher difficulty.
Not only the chart. If google enough, I firmly believe that you should also be able to find the freely available software code to generate the fake plots.
I don’t know if you are talking about current day… where there is no official pooling… and current pools can be cheated… because they can as they have no real method of determining how many valid plots you have.
I’m talking about official pooling protocol can not be cheated by creating fake plots.
Perfect, do the research…
because speculating you can break the math behind the Chia block-chain without any information how is not credible at all and just FUD
