My personal perspective on Chia: I started Chia on May 2nd, before it was traded. Before there was a price on Chia. I planned on having about 50 TiB of farming space. Netspace was 1-2 TiB. I thought that
- there would be low to moderate interest in Chia. That farming would be done mainly in China.
- that the price of XCH would be $1 or less
- that I would be able to solo farm with 50 TiB, get a few coins and hodl them until some years later, it might actually be worth something
As you can see, I was being completely delusional and wrong on many levels.
Another thing that I misjudged was how slow plotting actually is. I have repurposed 1 PC, 1 Ethereum mining rig and even 1 laptop for plotting. I didn’t build a dedicated plotter machine. It all adds up to about 29 plots (2.9 TiB) a day. At that speed my plotting barely offsets the netspace growth. This means if today my time to win is 65 days, tomorrow with 29 plots more, it will also be 65 days.
These are the facts : I’m not coming out on top of the horse race. What to do?
I figured until there would be official pool support, I might as well join hpool. Now that official pooling support is two weeks behind schedule, it seems to be have been the right decision. I try to minimize the risks that come with hpool by directing the payouts to a second, secure wallet that hpool doesn’t have the keys to so that I have no XCH in my farming wallet at all times. When pool support comes, I will re-plot with new keys.
Would I have gone into Chia, knowing that netspace was going to be what it is? I don’t know. Perhaps not.