I’m toying with the idea of starting a non-profit in which we provide economically efficient space, power, and services to farm plots.
We do not create plots ourselves, but we will store and farm them for you. Every member gets a payout of the XCH that is harvested that is in equal part to the plots they currently have active in the CoOp.
Would this be of interest to anyone?
That does sound interesting. I see an issue transferring plots to the co-op. Upload speeds for most people would make transferring plots incredibly slow.
You can’t farm without people’s private keys which is not considered safe. You can create plots for others with only their public keys, but if they give away their private keys or 24 secret words mnemonic they can lose control of their wallet and coins.
You should read up on Pooling because when the implementation is released in may-june there is a way for people to create plots that can be moved between pools as they wish, and you may want to organize a pool then.
My hope here would be to ship out drives to members that they fill, and then ship back to us.
Yes, this is true. We would have to require either a central pool address for plots, or would require members to provide the private key for the plots they created.
Remember though, you can always create a specific key just for the coop, and use a completely different key for your own personal. Harvested XCH can be sent to any address you choose at the time of farming.
It’s not safe because the farming is the part with the private keys needed, which they should not give to you. Remote harvesting might be an option if the person runs their own farmer, I think one of the people on the keybase “kiwihaitch” does something similar.
So you would own the drives?
Correct, the cooperative would own the drives. As a non-profit, it would be very economical for large datacenters / corporations to donate in a tax-deductible way any EOL hardware.
That’s super cool then!
Instead of buying another batch of drives I could pay you in escrow for one at a time, that you would pay me back upon receiving the drive back, less the amount to run the coop. That’s quite a bit of accounting to do, that would scare me if I were you.
CoOp could also pool buying if someone’s experienced in dealing with Shenzhen, or as you say, with data centers (used SAS drives can be had real cheap).
Pooling is extremely useful, and no doubt we would support a pool of some sort.
Our primary focus would be for those who want to plot and have a nice system to do so but do not have (nor want to have) a ton of hard drives sitting around.
Yep! Our idea at first is that just like with any other co-op, you’d have a membership fee. This fee would pay for a large external drive that we would then ship to you (but would remain our property). As you fill the drive, you can locally farm it via our pool. When it gets full, you ship it back to us, and we send you a new blank one, at no additional cost.
Not sure The Point here, 501c3 rules means you can’t give cash back to the people or keep it yourself. You need to have a charitable cause.
Cooperatives tax rules would just double tax everyone and not be tax deductable donations of equipment.
This is not tax advice, etc.
Cooperatives can be formed as a service to a community, of which we are! One of the well-known goals of Chia itself is to lessen the burden that cryptocurrency mining is having on global infrastructure. A member-owned cooperative that seeks to advance that goal is absolutely in line with the requirements.
You are absolutely correct that we cannot keep cash ourselves, that is the point! This is not to make money, but to provide a service to people who may not otherwise be able to farm large amounts of plots themselves. Also, XCH is not cash.
I read into it a bit, I had the same idea. I thought cooperatives would be great, but because it’s capital gains I’m not sure it works out so well. I encourage you to research it though because if you can crack it, it’s a wonderful service to be able to provide.
It’s just getting better by the minute! And Co-op is fabulously befitting. I’ve seen people calling for naming Chia pools co-ops so I think we (I mean you) need to claim the difference quickly.
Chia farm clearly benefits from data center colocation for many reasons. Something like this has to happen whether you’ll figure out the membership fee or someone else will do with escrow or something else.
I agree with Jeff here
He wants to colocate a SuperMicro 45-disk shelf eventually. I could buy a popular NetApp DS4246 with a FAS controller instead of IOM, real cheap. That’s usually a boon, a filer not just shelf, but for me it was a bummer, got me scared of complexities running Ontap. Also in the end I didn’t really want to scale so much outright.
Everyone’s trying to sell their spare plotting power now and no one as of yet offered farming solutions. This has to happen, there’s more need for it I think. With membership fee especially easy sell to people who would otherwise buy many drives only to fill them one by one over many days, and to people who wouldn’t want to expand to many drives otherwise! So basically everyone.
Would this membership fee model cover for too much success i.e. members flowing in who then want a new drive every other day and don’t stop?
Each member would be able to “check-out” a single drive at a time for free under their membership. Each additional drive would be a deposit for the value of the drive. Return the drive, get the deposit back!
As we get up and running with leasing DC space we could support intake of full, rackable systems as well.
Well yeah Netapps are very very intimidating (and expensive, and heavy, and complex). a 45 drive JBOD … is very simple. It’s 45 mount points that show up in Disk Management 
Cool! I think it’s the way to go. I want this to succeed, especially as a co-op, but for-profit would be great too. However I’m just one enthusiastic guy ATM.