GPU plotting, GPU farming… How many farmers have 128/256 RAM and 3000 series GPU? Which mobos support 256GB of RAM? What is the cost? Where is the green blockchain?
What’s next? Finally ASIC comes out, chia farming will die. Chia is on the wrong way…
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You CAN plot compressed with 10 year old cpu. Farming also but maybe C 6 is too high
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Two month ago, not many. Today, quite a few do
Don’t need it, 1000 series is fine)
Pretty much every server and workstation board in the world
about $500 to get a plotter that can do 5 min plots
Never moved
Not happening
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The upcoming plotter will make plotting fast even greener
Greener doesn’t mean cheaper. “Compressed” plots are delivering net space at a lower watt/TB than purchasing an equivalent amount of additional storage deployed on hdd. More energy efficient, less ewaste. Greener.
Poor comparison, because ppl who wanted more hdd ( more plots ) wanted a bigger piece of the pie, so most likely still will buy those extra hdd.
Then those extra drives that they buy will deliver even more net space, making them greener than they otherwise would have been on a watt/TB scale.
Thats very much based on farm setup.
Do you honestly believe all set ups will gain " greeness" simply by switching to compressed plots?
Yes. Otherwise it runs counter to the farmer’s financial incentives to make use of the compression. Though I suppose some people may make mistakes in their calculations and could end up worse off on average power per effective space, I think it’s more likely that they would overcompress and be unable to farm on weak hardware
You have to learn to walk before you can run. We’re currently only in a pre-beta version right now and still building/refining/retuning the tech on its path to optimization.
We have every intention of improving and optimizing the tech up until it’s finally launched, and onwards after launch and beyond. This is just the starting requirements for the earliest iterations. Ram usage and hardware compatibility options will definitely improve.
As to the Green argument, several of the commenters above may have already touched on it very well, as have the blog post we’ve put out, but the gist of the argument is as stated above. This new technology actually allows you to do more with less, and be greener at the end of the day when it’s all in balance.
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I mean Gigahorse does 64GB of ram and most Nvidia/AMD GPUs for farming.
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XCHs are issued based on the clock, not on the size of the netspace. As such, assuming 2 scenarios where either no one has any compressed plots or all have compressed plots, nothing changes as in both cases the same amount of XCH will be issued. This basically binds the XCH price to physical netspace, not really logical.
That said, assuming that all plots will be compressed, farming will require extra processing power, thus extra power consumption.
By the way, I am not trying to say that I would worry about that increased power draw. I would assume that such increase will be in single digit percentage points of all HDs power draw, so not really a concern (maybe for some tiny farms, though, as it may not scale well at the lower end).
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Nobody wants to acknowledge that Chia farmers are taking out “new” hard drive inventory from supply. That supply has to be replenished. Manufacturing is not “green”. In fact Bram always talked about using existing storage already out there. Well, what you say vs. what is happening doesn’t line up. So to me it’s a false narrative. Even Chia says you must use 12TB or great drives. Well, last time I checked, those aren’t EOL in any server environment that I’ve heard of.
The OP is right. Frankly speaking, it’s a hot mess whether the apologists can admit it or not. There are literally 1000 paths to plot and farm. Whereas ETH was, take GPU, plug in, run, earn.
If GPU plotting was great for Chia then it would have been discussed by Chia themselves earlier. If they knew it was possible, they didn’t share that. The fact it’s here? Of course they have to mold the narrative and talk about all the goodness of GPUs (POW) and being used in Chia.
I still believe in what Chia is doing. I’m not an apologist however and I don’t own pom-poms either. Unlike some. Chia’s great! Oh, you need drives? I can sell you some! I love Chia (and I make commission from Evergreen).
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That assumes HDD’s are used up like food. They last 10+ years and post halving many will end up back in the system unless XCH goes up a proportionate amount. Hopefully most farmers are also used refurbished/recycled HDD’s too which go for a much lower price.
It’s based on economics… it will all balance out… compressed plots will be greener in the end.
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Hard drives last 10+ years? Link me to an example please, a comparable to Chia farming. Are consumer drives tested with 24/7 operation? Um no. How about external drives? Consumer/NAS/Enterprise are all non comparable. No blanket statements unless you are an apologist. It’s conjecture.
Who is recycling the 12, 14, 16, 18TB size hard drives that Chia recommends? Don’t bother looking. No data centers are turning over those sized drives and I would love to see server facilities making use of those capacity drives. Cost wise it would make zero sense. Look on the forum which is the community. People aren’t scooping up used or recycled drives. Chia is creating the market for massive capacity hard drives, thus, creating inventory and manufacturing with is entirely BACKASSWARDS for what their so-called green values are.
Where I will disagree with the OP is in this complaint about RAM and motherboards/systems that would support. Putting older servers back into play, and using up server RAM for Chia IS sensible and IS on the right path. Making use of old hardware is where this should be.
Plotting or farming with an RTX 3060ti’s is a bunch of S if you ask me. If you can’t get this to work on older GPUs then GTFO is my attitude. Wow, I bought a sports car and it runs really fast. What’s your point? You accomplished nothing. Make an old car run fast or in this case, make old hardware run fast, maybe not as fast, and that is something worth talking about. Proving that a 3090 can plot fast and not bothering figuring out how to max out old hardware is shameful in my books. In this sense, it goes right into what the OP is saying.
The philosophy should be, let’s look at the EOL hardware and see how we can best make that work within Chia. Instead? Oh yeah, go get an RTX 3060ti. Chia has control of their own stuff. Oh sure, it’s coming. I ask, why didn’t you start there?
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FYI having an opinion doesn’t make you right. 
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Totally disagree with you on this one. Initially I was getting consumer external USB drives (ex WD Element which are all running well with no SMART errors) for Chia as there was not much good quality refurbished drives out there but over the 9mon or so I’ve been getting nothing but refurbished 12TB-20TB SATA (SAS are also available but I focus on SATA harvesters) HDDs plus recycled SAS cards and expanders. Chia is creating rapidly growing Ent. recycling business. I have purchased a ton of HDDs from recyclers like WaterPanther, MaxDigitalData and sellers like Tech on Tech (you can find them all on Amazon or their own online stores) who sell refurb Exos X14, X16, and even X18 drives and possibly other manufacturers but the ones I got looked like Exos. Some come with their own branded FW while others have the original Exos FW with SMART data cleared. They even back their drives with 2y-3y warranty. Not sure how good is their warranty service as I did not have to use it and these HDDs are running 24/7 with power setting adjusted to never sleep/spin down! These are just some examples and new recyclers show up driving the prices down. I’m so impressed with the quality of these drives that I’m actually using some in home production workloads (ex ZFS NAS) and not thinking of ever getting consumer grade “NAS” HDDs (ex WD Red Plus or whatever the Seagate equivalent is).
PS:This is not a paid advertisement as I have receipts to prove all my purchases, but if any one want to send me more HDDs I will not complain LOL
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I miss shucking drives and plotting in parallel myself. If Chia changed and got to this state, it can change again in the future - I’m willing to jump back in and see what happens. Agreed with OP for the 50TiB farmers though: spooling up a GPU or buying 128GB of ram sucks and probably isn’t worth it.
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I appreciate your contrarian viewpoint. Very brave! Jokes aside, I would only say let’s not count the chickens before they hatch. I’m definitely not trying to mock or discount what you’ve been able to do in terms of finding used hard drives. But what I am seeing, is that the ROI is in years. I personally would never buy a refurbished hard drive. For farming Chia, I guess there’s a lot less risk because you’re not going to lose anything critically important. I think the marketplace will fluctuate and because there are very few large capacity drives that are used, then the prices will start to escalate. In other words, for today, a short-term solution. Again, I’m not trying to rain on your parade. I think it’s fantastic that you have a good thing going. I also think that a good price for one person may not be considered a good price for another. I still believe that good pricing and large capacity hard drives are mutually exclusive. It’s like the difference between a few and a lot. Of course the few is going to be more expensive than the lot. I’m one of the few people who is more concerned about ROI than I am about burning rubber and plotting in 10 seconds.
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