I’m just saying that Ent HDD recycling is growing and whether that is because of Chia or other factors at least we the poor Chia farmers don’t have to pay ridiculous retail prices and there is some recycling happening. As for the ROI I totally agree with you and it sucks at least for a small <1PB farmer like myself who can only hope to hold and wait for XCH price to go up.
Now the GPU plotting may be a new and exciting thing for some (looking at the whales in the room) but personally i do not see the point for small farmers as I do not have that much storage to care whether it takes 20min/plot or 1min. The other thing is that GPU plotting is leaning more towards NVIDIA owners but personally I’m boycotting NVIDIA and went with AMD with the recent GPU gen just because of the clear anti-consumer behavior on NVIDIAs part with 30/40 series. The only exciting thing on the Chia roadmap is the “compressed” plot tech which will likely not be as exciting once available from Chia directly but more of a necessity to get our little farms back to pre compressed plot performance ( the great re-plot 2.0). Now the recently hinted PC RAM requirement (min 256GB RAM) as an entry to GPU plotting with Chia solution is completely ridiculous for a small farmer like me who will likely not be spending $1500+ for yet another plotting rig. They really need to cut that requirement down somehow or this will be out of reach for most small farmers. Hopefully their CPU plotting of compressed plots will be performing OK.
So I could ramble on and on but bottom line is that the situation for small farmers is not looking great (in my opinion) and we will likely be at a disadvantage vs the whales for a while at least but I guess such is life. If something does not change and small farmer stays at a disadvantage then ppl will start to give up on this project.
You don’t need to spend $1500 for a plotter that takes advantage of 128 to 256 GB of RAM AND GPU plotting.
Used workstations go for $100… RAM $250… used Tesla P4 $100… and a multiple of options for getting a Temp drive (NVME or Sata SSD’s in RAID 0) $100 tops if buying used….
Will play the key part of keeping the balance. Plot filter reduction will make it less economical to farm high compression with the fastest GPU’s.
With Plot filter reduction, one cannot simply plot to the highest compression and spend money on the latest GPU… as once the filter get reduced, your max amount of farmable space is cut by half…. One would have to go out and buy the next gen GPU to keep up. ROI’ing doing this would be hard.
Furthermore with the plot filter reduction, disk I/O’s doubles. At first doubling something small stays small, but it quickly becomes medium and then big…. People will chose to plot higher k sizes to fight against the higher disk I/O’s… this also discourages high compression and high wattage GPU’s…
This will naturally move people to SSD’s instead of HHD’s, which are super energy efficient… more demand for SSD’s creates competition and price reduction as manufacturers crank up the supply… making storage units with efficient compressed plots more economical than fast GPU’s with high compressed plots.
Like I said, it’s economical… in the end it will balance all out long term… short term there will be swings that will make people wonder… but it will balance out in the end.
So you get an old Xeon with 256GB DDR3 just to plot with GPUs for few hundreds bucks at eBay. This may be great for a whale but how does this help a small farmer? It does not and just creates addition expense for purpose built PC which likely will not be used for anything else.
you have a point. i remember a month ago i asked is 128gb would be enough to plot with gpu and got YES as answer, but apperently it doesnt work and it’s said because of windows operation system. wow. let’s blame windows for everything, very professional. i spent money to buy extra 96gb for nothing.
now i’m not in hurry to buy neither ddr3 server nor new gpu.
If you don’t have a lot to plot, you can just make compressed plots with a CPU+ssd like before, no need to change anything.
Whales vs small farmers imo is always a bit of a false contradiction.
Small farmers can have cost benefit per TB from having a simple setup with little overhead or by using stuff they already had. As soon as you cross over a certain threshold of size, you start adding cost for space, cooling, disk shelves, cables, etc, etc.
The other thing is, you don’t need to keep your plotter around for ever.
I made a GPU plotter for about 500 Euro (that would be $400 in the USA I think) that does sub 5 minute plots. I will replot everything (250 TiB) and then sell it again. Total cost might be 0 for plotting hardware, don’t expect to loose more than 50 bucks on that system since I did some good shopping and put in the time to put it together myself.
They need to come up with a better excuse than the “It’s Windows fault” one. One other answer is you’re placing your bets on the wrong plotting team. GigaHorse can plot w/GPU on as little as 64GB (32GB maybe??) with GPU.
My point exactly. First it was OG plots which literally lived only for months then if you want to switch to a pool, because you have to as difficulty grows, you need to replot to NFT which also required 128GB RAM if you want to plot faster with MM. Now yet again we have to replot to plot 2.0 if we want to stay competitive as we will be loosing 20-25% performance if we do not stay with the new tech and reploting to 2.0 will be confusing at first as everyone will be scratching their head trying to guesstimate what C level to pick based on their farming hardware and many small farmers use low power harvesters and farmers to stay “green”. The quickly growing HW requirements with each plot revision whether it’s to generate plots or simply farming is really starting to remind me the progression of CPU to GPU then eventually unobtainable ASICs in other coins and this will lead to death of small farmers who will eventually start unplugging their small farms as they do not generate enough ROI to keep the lights on.
Small initial cost to plot a small farm fast! Then they have the option to keep the plotter to tinker with or sell the plotter after plotting…. And make most of the original cost back…
“Have to… need to”??? No one is making anyone do anything. OG plotter / farmer still works. Happy w/that…do nothing and ‘win’ Chia. Unhappy with that…make use of some or all of the ‘new fangled’ tools / plot formats to increase plot speed / rewards, the world just made your day!
Small nodes can be as efficient as they want to be, just like whales. It all about personal choice. Nothing has been discarded or obsoleted in the Chia ecosystem.
Bottom line…you have no point…except to complain about growing possibilities…
You can use your current CPU plotter and plot compressed plots now… and not have to spend a dime besides the electricity to run your already owned CPU plotter.
C1’s and C2 compressed plots are so gentle on CPU’s that your current harvester won’t have any issues with those. And those compressed plots give you the most bang.
Every current Chia farmer who still has their original plotter can still take advantage of compressed plots with their original harvesters and not pay anything more than time and electricity.
