Chia is impossible to mine as a home user without pooling

Server was dell d720xd £400 + £200 for 24 sas drives £100 for caddies. Extra memory was free from work.

How long are you farming now for Chia without anything?

I have my posting in the “unluckiest” forum posting … lol

To be fair i had a choppy start - i was running multiple nodes with unreliable networking (duff switch) and upnp issues - that has all stabilised now though (for about the last 2-3 days)

I am generating about 70+ plots a day now, 1 full node, 50% of plots in SAS drives local to the farmer and the rest in the plotters - the farmer is mostly idle - the network is now managed (it helped when i dumped the dodgy switch) - i started plotting about 2-3 weeks ago and have been racing netspace but i have been at “8-10 days” now for about a WEEK so statistically it is imminent, mildly overdue

I still have some network stuff to improve and some plotter optimisation - in the time i have been “mining” chia i was able to keep up plotting, but the farming not so well

I believe i have everything operating at 95%/nominal but i can’t be sure because of the SILENT issues leading up to this point

Still …
Farming status: Farming
Total chia farmed: 0.0
User transaction fees: 0.0
Block rewards: 0.0
Last height farmed: 0
Plot count: 944
Total size of plots: 93.441 TiB
Estimated network space: 3938.728 PiB
Expected time to win: 1 week and 1 day

I am planning a “first reward party” with my kids …

3 Likes

seems like this is the right thread for my question.

should chances not increase if there is a harddrive shortage? (which is bound to happen)

To you guys running servers with high performance day plotting, how / where are you sourcing storage? I’m good for plotting for now and storage will be more limiting than plotting soon enough.

I still think there is plenty of “spare” storage out there - already installed but not used. I do expect the INCREASE in netspace to slow though (at least i hope so). A lot of my disks are 5-10 year old SAS drives from a life in a data centre. They have been restarted maybe 10 times in their lives - just spinning , and spinning, and spinning - i personally don’t use the larger drives, but i do have to deal with 100 or so drives which is non trivial without large enclosures, and the higher power requirement which will make them less economical in the longer term

Saying that even the old SAS drives have MORE THAN DOUBLED in price since Jan - i bought a few dozen for my own use before finding chia but the price to pay is now 2-2,5x higher than i paid then

Since they are dated 2012-2015 they have more limited resale potential - the $/TB is lower but i am classing them as disposable so am not looking to recover much on resale. However the farming load will hardly have aged them as long as they are looked after (kept cool and kept spinning)

The won’t INCREASE but they might DECREASE less … lol

A pool will smooth all that out, so you do get incremental returns and can validate your setup pretty quickly

Can we not start our own pool? Surely i cant be the only one with this idea

there are pools out there. this forum is also getting a pool just waiting on official release date. at the moment you can only join pools if you give them your private key

The question is is is safe to give your key?

I come from the data hoarding community (r/DataHoarder) and we absolutely love 18TB drives. As a chia plotter, I’m happy with a chia, but as a data hoarder, I’m very upset that it is substantially more expensive to archive the data that I care about.

I’ll be first to redirect some of my plotting power to a “new” pool - one where i don’t need to give them my private keys I think the “protocol” update comes out on 17th - i guess that will be a release with the supporting chain functionality. I do hope it is not just a spec and there are people working on implementations now, and a usable one is not far behind

Mining pools seems to be the answer for the future

1 Like

How can he lie if I see his wallet every time we meet? and I see the ETH he has and the profitibility as it progresses. Maybe electricity costs are very high where you live… It’s 0.13$ per kWh where I live

Hopefully

Okay I am a new farmer here and I will add my 2 cents worth:

Of course most of us get attracted to new projects with the promise of reward, I mean why else would we spend real dollars in hopes of returns in “fairy-dust,” for all we know the Age of Cryptophoria just might be positioned for a massive collapse and nobody ever wants to touch crypto post vaccination era. (Chances of crypto-crash astronomically higher than my winning two simultaneous blocks in 24 hours with my 9 plots).

Why we start to invest? Well tech is cool and anything new tech is cool and we think we’re entering early so we we want to see the project develop and become active participants and so on…

Why the anxiety? We get too focused on ROI and forget to have any fun… You’re in it, play it like an RPG grind, have fun with it, plots in themselves are digital assets, what if few years down the line verified plots start selling like hot cakes? Follow this chain of thought : Chia rush = hdd rush = hdd shortage = hdd inaccessible BUT plot = HDD activity = value preserved in terms of ssd expenditure (semi-conductors are short in supply and you have spent semiconductors to plot - plot in itself is of inherent value which we will realise in near future).

The mistake we make: haste and lack of patience. Hey, I get it chances are diminishing by the minute. But are we taking all metrics into consideration? I think we are leaving a host of disqualification factors aside. So what if the big money has plotted racks upon racks of hhds in data centres? Isn’t the query generated at random? Isn’t the response a close variant of the lookup? How about one of my 9 plots having 15% close match vs a data centre with 0.1% match? How about downtime and network failures? How about my 9 plots being live with 1% close match with a data centre with multiple 99% close matches facing network errors and downtime? How about other variables that exist? I for one refuse to believe the probability counter and push on with my limited disk capacity of handful of terabytes and 3 plot per day generation capacity. Won’t my few plots being live over the decade have a better chance to reap other eventualities over those who give up sooner? So I suggest let’s all be patient for now and see the future together. Of course I’d want your plots gone but I like to generate Karma too, so please, stay. Yes HOME MINERS, I am talking to you, we don’t want to give the bully an easy win. Bitcoin didn’t get to where it is today in a matter of months, it took good part of a decade! And we’re expecting this to be the next big thing - not with a quitter’s attitude I don’t think!

The big guy is not always bad… He’s doing us a favour by quickly burning through the already scarce semiconductors and thereby incrementally increasing the value of the plots. I give you a scenario : SSDs, NVMEs not available anywhere for 6 months(like gfx cards) - go make a plot or… B U Y A P L O T!

I ll paint another picture. You’re sitting in a boat with your fishing pole or two… and there are speed boats with massive nets trying to sweep the lake…what is your strategy for victory here? Did you come out to take all the fish or just the few that will make it a fun trip? Sure the boats are upsetting but isn’t the idea that you just sit there till the fish bites…

There is the easiest solution for those who don’t see the fun of it - sell your HDDs buy Chia and keep it in lock and key for 10 years…

No offence intended to anyone. To those who love the grind, Grind On!

P. S. I don’t intend to join any pools, I will take my chances solo and keep the winnings.

3 Likes

I don’t agree !

If it was JUST about comparable probability of winning, that would be fine.

But it is not - my premise is that problems in the mining operation and software means that knowledge of “wasted” mining does not emerge for days, weeks or even months. A large solo miner will KNOW if they have a problem in DAYS, a small miner may not know for MONTHS

It is NOT a level playing field without a viable pool, even one that charges reasonable fees

Project is still beta(ish), field is level since problems are much bigger for bigger miners, their cost to arrive at stable future is much higher than ours, we just have to stick around. Plain and simple strategy for solo miner - just stick around…for me 10 percent bad code = 1 bad plot. For a data center it could be multiple harddrive and hours of troubleshooting… The whales will create the waves, we just have to ride them…(sorry about the excessive use of metaphors)

It took bitcoin almost 2 years till the 1st pool was a thing…

Are you trying to convince us to not farm chia till aws and google start farming it…shure, you should lead us by example