Flexpool - estimated rewards varies from calculators

I have 266 TiB of plots, all on Flexpool, I’ve recently been adding more plots - the bulk of those completed just over 24 hours ago. My estimated earnings recently rose above 2 XCH a month, and then whilst still adding plots dropped below 2 XCH, and then rose above 2 again.

Flexpool estimates my monthly earnings as 2.0955 XCH.

My estimated time to win is 3 weeks, so that equates to 0.36 XCH a month

So 2.0955 + 0.36 = 2.4566 XCH a month estimated, yet the two Chia calculators (XCH Scan & Chia Calculator) both estimate 2.71 and 2.883 XCH a month respectively.

The pools current average luck is 101%, and I have 0.33% stales, so whys there quite a big discrepancy?

I’m still a soul-man

Pools dont account for the .25 you get when you hit a block. But i see you have.
The calculators often use the wrong netspace.

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I would rather ignore any stats that pools provide. For once that depending on what starting point / time frame is being used, those results may vary. The second is that there is not enough transparency to verify whatever is provided. So, the only thing that you can depend on is your daily / weakly / monthly earnings.

Also, when xchcentral was providing pool results, Flex was trending in the lower half. Although, I exchanged few emails with xchcentral, and maybe their results (one drive per pool they monitored) were not really reliable at that time. There was also a post several months back about pools resilience to dust storms, and Flex was rather at the bottom (basically no improvements after the first big storm). That didn’t help during that Feb-Apr low intensity storm. What I noticed is that stales reported for my farm were basically identical (in percentage and time when they occurred) to the top 10 farms (even though my farm was much smaller), so for sure those were due to Flex equipment.

Also, there were few events that Flex should be clarifying, but instead of that, Chris (Flex person) was blaming everyone else, and not bothering to check his side (there is one post from about a couple of weeks ago), and I was not really happy with responses provided by them.

Saying that, I was with Flex from almost the very beginning (a couple of pools shut down on me). However, a couple of days ago, I quit Flex, as earnings that I saw were potentially not in line with what those should be.

I’ve accounted for the 0.25, as I’m ETW every 3 weeks, that works out at 0.36 a month.

Chia reports 25.471 EiB
Chia Calculator 25.765 EiB
XCH Scan 25.93 EiB

So as the calculator report a larger Netspace, that should make my estimated earnings lower, yet both are higher 2.71 and 2.76 XCH a month this morning, compared to Flexpool which is 2.0898 + 0.36 = 2.4498 XCH a month.

I think the only way to be sure is to change pools, and see what I earn at a new pool.

I used to be with Foxy Pool when I had my OG plots, think I’ll change back.

If I look at Foxy Pool the daily reward is 0.28 XCH a day per PiB, I have 0.259765625 PiB

0.259765625 x .28 x 365 /12 = 2.2123 XCH a month, plus the 0.36 = 2.5723, which is closer to what the calculators estimate.

I’ll look at few other pools, any suggestions?

When you change pools, the luck, net space, etc. changes, so really it is not that easy to check it. xchcentral had dedicated drives (i think) for each pool (not sure how big though), and they were trying to use API to get the clean data, but we saw rather big errors in what was reported. I also had before (long time ago) separate drives dedicated to three pools, but after a month basically gave up (if I remember, at that time Flex was beating Space pool). I think few other people were doing the same thing.

I was thinking that maybe if several people would dedicate two/three drives to different pools, and we would average those data somehow, maybe that could be one way of testing it (although, each of us has a node that has different capabilities, ISP that potentially is flaky from time to time in a different way), so there are problems with that as well, unless there is a bigger sample of people.

It is kind of sad, that Chia doesn’t provide any monitoring like that in UI, so we could share that data.

Not really. I really liked Flex, but … I think that I got really pissed off during that long / low intensity dust storm, as they reported their luck almost always at 110%, and there were clear patterns that the problem was on their side, yet they never bothered to look into that. And that last issue, where they server basically stopped processing any blocks, where they claimed that it was all good was the final nail.

I think that Space is a good choice, but for me the fact that they are so big implies that they are one of the reasons that smaller pools are collapsing. Once there is no competition, they will be able to do whatever they want.

I would wait for that xchcentral to come back online (if they will come back at all), as they monitored about 10 pools, and whatever problems they had, that is potentially the best source of pools performance.

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Space reports .305 per PiB for the last 24 hrs.
I understand jacek concerns about their size , but to me it was a better bet than flex.
Iirc flex signs for you, so although you could say its still decentralised, my opinion is that its not as its centralised signing by them albeit with your keys.
Space uses the official protocol and you sign your own blocks.

I’m using the official protocol with Flex, you don’t have to use their software.

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I was also only using the official protocol with Flex. Although, when I had to do changes to my full node, I used Flex Farmer (the unofficial one) to keep farming, and not be pressed for time, what was really convenient.

Replying to some of these comments:

  1. Flexfarmer is a lower power light alternative. It makes your equipment (including HDDs) last longer, use less power, use less resources lookup faster, and is quite a bit more stable than the node. It also runs on a lot more platforms including 32bit. You just double click to start it same as eth mining software. That being said it’s not required to use it it’s an option. It doesn’t require your wallet keys but does require your plot key to sign blocks.

  2. There was a long running profit comparison between major pools and we basically all made within 3% of each other so no pool is really better per say. I like to think we do a little better when the Chia client has issues simply because some farmers are on FF and avoid them.

  3. FF will be coupled with our own better node eventually. That has always been our long term plan. I assume most farmers wish sync was faster.