Question: do plots have a limited shelf-life? I have 60 TB worth of plots at the moment and the farmer is farming away. I cannot invest in more storage-capacity at the moment so I will be farming these 60 TB of plots for a while.
Do plot-files lose their “value” in some way? I have difficulty understanding the concept. Are plot-files, lying in their final destination, “milked dry” at some point? In other words, is there a point in time where a plot-file has been read from start to end and there is nothing else to farm from it?
The natural follow up question would be: if a plot-file has been “milked dry” (and is now “old and useless”), can it be deleted without having an impact on the chances of winning new Chia?
Related question: if I ever win Chia, is it possible to see which plot-file it came from (the winning plot) and did that particular plot-file therefore lose it’s right to exist (as in “it has done its job”) and can thus be deleted (making room for new plots). Does it even work that way?
If neither of the above is true, and plots keep their value forever, that would mean I would need to store the plot-files on long-term storage which is fast enough to avoid the “you are more than 5 seconds late so you missed the boat” issue. Correct?
Disclaimer: I have more fun squeezing the last bit of performance of my plotting-host and optimizing my Chia platform than being desperate to win.
Yes, that’s basically it.
If there is a theoretical possibility of a plot becoming useless, I’m not entirely sure but at least practically, it will just keep going. A plot can win multiple times for sure so you can just keep it.
Let’s say - hypothetically - that a plot has 5 proofs and after they have all won once, that plot would become useless. From 60TB of plots, that one plot would have to win 5 blocks by itself. With the current netspace(growth) that might happen in the next 500 years or so.
That said, AFAIK there is nothing preventing the Chia software by consensus to e.g. stop accepting K32 and require K33 minimum, or excluding all plots from before a certain creation date to participate in the lottery.
We can only hope that there will be a transitional period. Releasing a new major version which makes all “old format” plots invalid all of a sudden will aggravate a lot of people…