You are not addressing my comment - we don’t know if the software is working properly as it is far more complex and there are far more SILENT failure modes than earlier Bitcoin mining. If it was JUST probabilities then fine, sit down, chill out - but it is not !
This is not just a plug in and forget operation - this is not the same world as the first 2 years of Bitcoin, it is far less transparent … A product was released with a shitload of “pre-mining” and problematic software - and a wall of prior equipment form previous similar HD mining projects - your comparison is not equivalent
What other choice is there then? To tell you the truth I have never had any faith in any crypto ever, and I am still not convinced. Again with a metaphor - if tomorrow all of the world’s crypto were cashed out and or traded in for tangible assets, would there be sufficient fiat currency to do it? Have we not been part of a rigged game from the beginning? The world of crypto is far from transparent, so is the stock exchange, and so is the printing press known as federal reserve, so is the manner in which banks create waves in real estate markets every decade… What is really transparent? And what is not rigged? What choice do we actually, really have? Ideally I say let’s shut down Chia project altogether, but I know that’s not happening and I was too young to have purchased any Google stock when it was just starting out, and I like many others who missed out on many of the things want to participate, rigged or not, better if rigged I say, I am here to get burnt… But what other choice is there really? Take chances on what is here in proportion of bet what you can afford to loose… I don’t know if that addresses what you are asking…I do agree the idea of a software generating random static code does seem fundamentally flawed but, they are running with it, so much so that there is already 4mn tbs of it (I wont be surprised if tomorrow we learn that 2/3 of the code is erroneous-but-there in could lie the lottery, the good code, the luck). And the only way to find out is stick around…
P. S. They all claim that we re trying to develop a truly decentralised instrument of barter, but leaving aside the big money hoarders, what happens to the coin on exchanges? What happens when the likes of corporations go out and buy a chunk of it or even endorse it… The purpose gets defeated, and the coin starts to behave like a regulated commodity… It has all been a game and I suggest we simply play it in the spirit of a game… Nothing more…there will be winners and there will be losers, our goal should be to play in the spirit of fun and celebrate if we win and not make it a big deal if we loose, and the best way to do it is to invest what we can have fun loosing… something like that…
P. P. S. Why is nobody rewarding protecting the earth, or conserving it? Why is all the reward geared around parasitic level of consumption, to the extent that, artificial scarcity is leveraged to build values? If they want to do truly green they should start awarding crypto for planting trees, recycling, using less and less of non renewable energy… Why is nobody rewarding that? The flaw goes far deeper than the code!
Good job ianj, you’ve made me talk myself out of the program - I quit! Now I am thinking I am devoting needless resources, time and electricity to further the cause of something artificial at a cost, even if small, to the environment - I am not that guy, thanks a lot ianj!
I am not arguing against the project - i am arguing that going into production with a wall of rewards waiting and no pooling for “normies” to gain rewards was NOT a good idea and the best way i can think of to stop “miner” adoption and hamper decentralization. I don’t think it was intentional, just poor prioritization and no doubt they were surprised at how quickly the project was adopted.
Having seen this before, i wasn’t - going live in the middle of a moon cycle offer “cheap money” was bound to elicit this response. I didn’t know about the project until mid April - my failing of course
You re still early bro… It’s not that old… But for me it is, I’ll not part take in wilful burning of semiconductors during a period of shortage - i’ll revisit when the supply has improved and the process matured…
Nothing is unintentional - they say they have prefarmed Chia to fundraise in future - isn’t that like insider trading…we don’t know how much Chia… We don’t know their target offload price… Seems to me like they have gotten themselves a head start, put beach towels past the finish line, are sitting on them sipping coconut water, and watching the world dog it out when they can write themselves any amount of cheque whenever they please and however many times they please…am I misinformed here or have they admitted to the prefarmed to fund-raise detail?
They say they don’t intend to sell the pre-farm or “strategic reserve”. It’s not a legal document so take it for what its worth. It’s a matter of faith and trust in the end.
I wonder…how much trust do I want to put in the hands of people with 21 million prefarmed coins who could not have been bothered to share 0.05XCH with the founding beta members…Infinitely increasing farming difficulty aside, more I read more this project starts to stink… There has to be massive rot and decay nearby…
BTW 21mn coins are valued today $2,310,000,000 (@ $1100/XCH) assuming someone was stupid enough to pay them the amount today in exchange for fairy dust…I mean this is what I find mind boggling, how do you create billions upon billions out of thin air? The crowd has funded a relatively large chunk towards the project at $20/ tb people have funded $80mn in real money towards spinning drives alone and I would say employed more than 10 times as much in ssds, nvmes, and processing equipment and electricity. How is it that the code maker is already in possession of 2.3bn worth of coin? Mind boggling the math simply just as random as the code…
And here is the flaw in the process - they got to farm 21mn coins against what size main net? 1PB 2PB - 8TB? So when you strike 2XCH against a mainnet of 4EB shouldn’t your XCH be worth in the ratio of competitors defeated? How is their XCH worth the same as mine earned in future…the idea is flawed, they should be petitioned to destroy their reserve and farm one under the same circumstance as the rest of us…it’s like they picked out the entire farm and left the rest of us to play hunger games amidst bare barks and leaves and rotting fruit… I don’t want to use the S word here…can someone please help out and say it for me…
Not sure if I’m falling on a troll here…Why so salty?
No one is forcing you to continue investing / farming / trading on Chia if you see the setup shady or unfair.
This is a valuable point - I wouldn’t invest much of my money on Chia (that’s why I’m farming) due to the potential risks related to the coin (which exist in one way or another in most crypto coins). However, on the positive note, the team has been very professional so far, and the plan is solid, so an exit scam wouldn’t be likely nor sensible scenario.
When you invent something new, let it be a startup or a crypto coin, you get to hold even 100 % of the reserve/capital. If the idea is good, people are willing to buy small portions for high sums. Of course, the creators aren’t on the same line as other people - they are being rewarded for their innovation and work. The idea of the team to have to give their funds away so that you could get a bigger piece of the pie is just ridiculous since that would literally kill the whole project (or is the team supposed to work for free?) leaving everyone with nothing.
If you read about startups, you might learn that each Series funding round dilutes the previous owners’ positions. However, the key here is that it is better to own a small portion of something valuable than a big portion of something worthless. Suits very well for Chia too, IMO.
Oh would you lookit that the first card to fall, let’s watch this house of cards come tumbling down… Time for big oil to rise again TP$ 150 on the Brent I’d bet…
Ok I am curious now - with netspace touching 5EiB now let’s say it eventually is targeting 50Eib or even 100 or more. It’s not like all the plots will be focused in one place, rather it will be spread out around the globe.
Now when the block challenge queries the network is it physically (electronically) possible to scan the headers connected to all the 50EiB of space? (If you think about it, eventually all headers are going to comprise to be a massive virtual spinning drive looking up data) Or will they have a protocol to do regional sweep? Let’s say it’s physically impossible to scan the entire globe as fast as they are trying to so they implement a rotating sweep that goes over different regions so that bits of XCH keeps getting thrown over all the corners and middles and other parts of the network? Am I making sense or the question sounds movie inspired?
The “retail” distance to cross the globe is 2-300ms, so if it is a single interaction, it will not add much to the overhead of interacting globally. If it works something like Bitcoin protocol it may use the gossip protocol where the network organizes itself in many clusters depending on the preference of each node to its connections
There is no single point of contact with the gossible protocol and you would effectively need to attempt to spider/connect to all clusters which i would guess is non trivial since there is no central repository of gossip clusters - they are formed dynamically
Again with the exponential growth in the network and I am suggesting that we re hitting EiBs in 100s, and trying to run the global barter on this, from a 25 cent candy to 250,000 home purchase, the transaction volume is enormous, hypothetically, with the network hitting that size, getting many many close matches in query response, wouldn’t a regional sweep, static or rotating, provide a faster solution? Just outside of China you have India and Pakistan with massive populations conducting volumes upon volumes of transactions daily… And we have the backbone fiber optic prone to downtimes…
I have a theory in regards to quality of the plots - I think using over powered processors, lower threads and excess parallel plotting is degrading the quality of the code… I am a coding noob but I have rough idea about the nature of SSDs - they are a bunch of semi conductors that work like on/of switches in order to store data - one plot is 1.7TB data both read and write so two is 2x1.7 and 6 is 6x1.7 and so on… now semiconductors are delicate and what degrades their health is the read write which is basically store or drain of electrical current. When we re trying to plot 6 in parallel we re generating 10.2tbs of read write, and in the process when one code written 111111000, gets read 111110000, because that cell died midst writing, it can corrupt the entire sequence, correct me if I am wrong please, but I think rather than industrial churning of plots we should experiment with mid powered CPUs because they will be less aggressive, more threads per plot, 4 for example, minimum 8-12 gb ram per plot and restrict 2-3 in parallel, we might generate quality plots…please test a set and check it for consistency of production
I understand your concern, but it is not as concerning as you might think!
Code does not “degrade” - it is ultimately made of ones and zeroes. The physical media upon which those ones and zeroes are stored might degrade, but the engineers and scientists who made that physical storage are obviously quite concerned about degradation of physical storage! There are all kinds of fail-safes built in to modern physical storage so that this physical degradation is mitigated.
Think of the hard drive that stores your bank account balance. If even a single one or zero in that balance is changed, either you or the bank is going to be very upset, depending on who came out the loser.
TL;DR version: code doesn’t degrade, physical media does. But very smart people have already mitigated this problem for you and you shouldn’t worry about it unless your operating system is telling you that your physical media has problems.
Hey thanks for sorting that out for me… All this is very new so all sorts of questions arrise you know, it’s a lot of data sitting on a potentially vulnerable media that degrades more with use and with industrial grade plotting the SSD is getting used like volatile memory already…imagine that the collective use of nvmes around the world like a giant RAM stick… W O W!!!
It seems like there are a few misconceptions in this thread. It seems due to not taking the time to do the math, or misunderstanding economics. This thread is too long, and the hours the day not long enough to address them all, but I will address two erroneous ideas:
"Chia isn’t really green, electric costs will blow up"
"Just buy a GPU because it’s more profitable to GPU mine Ethereum"
Chia is green. Yes, people are going to buy disks to compete for Chia, yes you will see disk prices increases as well as HDD & NVME shortages. But Chia is still way greener than GPU mining.
I mine Ethereum because it’s profitable, but there is a reason they are moving away from PoW to PoS.
Let’s just look at some basic numbers: watts per dollar and rewards per dollar invested
An RTX 3070, if you can find it at MSRP is $500. Using good settings, you’ll use about 110W and produce around 60-62MH/s. You’ll make about $285/month. This is profit after subtracting ~$8 of power costs. Reference: Mining Calculator Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash and Monero
To get the equivalent payout in Chia, you’d need 35 plots. That’s 3.5TB. Reference: https://chiacalculator.com/
You can get a 4TB HDD for under $100. It will use about 10w while plotting and 5-7.5w thereafter. The power cost will be around $0.50 USD per month. For the same power usage and power cost as the 3070 I could be making $4275.
So… you get 5x the reward per dollar invested on Chia versus Ethereum and you use 15-22x less power… Oh, and GPUs are darn near impossible to find at MSRP if they are available at all. I know, it’s taken me many months to acquire my 330 mh/s across 5 GPUs. I can buy a 4TB HDD for under $100 and start plotting today with very little technical know-how.
Does Chia use electricity? Yes.
Is it likely to surpass that of some countries? Probably.
Is it significantly greener than PoW cryptocurrencies? Yes.
I don’t quite agree with the financial calculation - you are assuming 100% payout on the now 4.7EiB which is not going to happen, as to what will happen is a single digit percentage of that EiB will get paid while the remaining 90%+EiBs will be sucking energy to perpetuity - so definitely not green!
(it’s not just the HDDs, but also the systems keeping them rotating - in order to pay 0.47 EiB the non-winning 4.23EiBs have to keep running for ever and while the cost is not passed on to the winner, it is integrated into the value of the XCH and will infinitely keep rising for as long as the network is online - cost per tb is perpetual not a one time pay. There are other things to consider, the opportunity cost for example of devoting physical, monetary and electrical resources for systems upkeep as opposed some genuine humanitarian effort or professional research or what have you. Green crypto is a good marketing technique but the reality is far far from it).
