Makes me feel a lot better about all this new progress with GPU’s and compressed plots.
So it sounds like with todays current technology, C9 and more is really energy intensive. Not worth doing unless you have free energy.
And the fact that it sounds like a CPU with integrated graphics will support the higher compressed plots (c7-8) as a harvester. This is encouraging! It means small farmers can still take advantage of all this! Getting a used small efficient computer with a CPU with integrated graphics should be with in the reach of small farmers with less than 0.3 PiB and can all be ran in a normal typical household. This keeps with Chia’s overall plan of PoST.
I hope adding support for OpenCL is on the top of the list to do! I know developing for the small farmers is not as enriching when it comes to making money as it is for bigger farmers, but I think it’s critical that a small farm can continue to compete with the bigger farms.
A few more questions,
What’s the capability with the minimum specs listed above? Be nice to compare minimum requirements performance with the recommended performance. (Speed to make a C7-8 plot and amount that can be farmed?)
Again, thanks for taking some time and answering all the questions!
How much more wear and tear will this put on our hard drives used for farming already created plots? If everything is being done on the fly by the GPU’s than my guess is that it should be relatively the same as before…
Everyone needs to take a step back and chill. This is not moving PoST towards PoW. Chia (and mmx) is still about storage, that has not changed and will not change in the face of GPUs nor ASICs. The k-size requirement and plot filter make sure of that.
People getting into farming with a small farm can finish plotting in days with a GPU instead months without a GPU. That is net energy savings. Plotted with madmax and don’t like it? No problem, take a few days to replot to Chia’s plot 2.0. Don’t like Chia? No problem, replot to mmx. These developments increase the portability of storage which is a great thing.
Nobody’s forcing anyone to farm C7/C8 plots with a GPU. Just farm C6 plots on your existing farmer. On a 14TB drive the difference is 4 plots. Want C7/C8? Get an old GPU for $25 like what max is doing himself. Make your own decision depending on your farm size to see if changing hardware and marginally higher electricity cost to do C7/C8 is worth it for you. Or just keep farming your existing uncompressed (finished) plots – they still work!
Will plotting ever be not 128GB ram minimum, i have 1 NVME SSD and rtx 2070 super GPU, i want compression plots but dont have 128GB ram, will compression plots plotting be available on CPU or GPU with 16GB RAM, like how madmaxplotter is currently working on 16GB RAM?
will gtx 750ti or dual core CPU be able to farm 56TB at C7, C8 or C9?
I’ve seen people complain about the fee and that Max should open source this. A reminder to all of you that the last time Max open sourced a plotter only one company sponsored him (to my knowledge), Flexpool. And yet, 98% of people who used his plotter went to different pools. So Max couldn’t ask us for more money and the community signaled to all developers/organizations that sponsorships/open source would not be rewarded. Chia didn’t sponsor Max, it bought the tech (haven’t seen the agreement but thats what I think) which is different. If you want people to open source they need to get money and if you want corporations to sponsor things you yourself need to give those corporations your business to thank them. Instead most of you gave your money to corporations that didn’t do anything for Max.
Max isn’t the one that killed open source in the Chia farming community, you are. Did you use his plotter and if so what pool did you end up on? Unless the answer is Flexpool, your behind why his next development is closed source. So why are you surprised he’s now closed sourcing and charging a fee? If we had 70%+ of max’s plotter customers coming to us we’d have very happily paid big dollars for this tech and open sourced it.
Also so many mistakes here. HPool and Space both run closed source software. What open source? Nothing they have is open source to my knowledge? The open source reference Chia pool software can’t run a pool at scale and the pools that ran it had frequent crashes until they modified/fixed it. Even with Flexpool while most of our stuff is closed our website is open source and a few pools have used it (without a thank you).
For example, this is Space’s github
This is Flexpool’s github
This is Hpool’s github
I can tell you exactly which Chia pool has done the most for the open source community because I know it’s us. Some pools may run open source software but they haven’t “developed” they are just using others work without contributing.
For those of you that want to use the “official” software. Chia has been very careful to not release “official” software. Most things are released as a reference. The Chia Network wants the community to build things, they are not here to compete with their own community. I’m pretty sure they expect no one to be using any of their software in 10-20 years the same way no one uses the original BTC or ETH wallets. Chia Network as a company is based on selling technical/support services, not software. They released software as a base for the community to use and build off of and are not here to compete with their own community. I’ve seen some people get mad because Flexpool, Max and others are “competing” with Chia’s released software when the Chia Network likely has the exact opposite reaction and is happy that someone is doing something. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Chia Network developments made by the community are few, you really need to get behind those that are doing so so that the chain can thrive instead of attacking them.
Maybe if the community actually did something to support open source software instead of complaining that others should develop software and open source we’d have more.
nobody really cares if the website is open source or not, its not that challenging to build a decent website. He means that Flexpool has flexfarmer whilst Spacepool only accepts people running their own full node. Personally i understand why flexfarmer is closed source, im even using it as my old laptop only has a 120GB SSD so without flexfarmer i wouldnt be able to farm.
I mean we spent close to 6 figures on that website and maintain a full-time frontend dev so I would say a lot went into it. Flexpool has an optional Flexfarmer, emphasis on optional. So that should be no different than any other pool besides Hpool where it isn’t optional. Never got why some people hate options!
spending that much seems crazy to me, personally i couldnt care less about the UI, charts, calculator etc, if i get payouts then im happy, but im not the one running a complex pool. Do as you wish, people are always going to complain. if the compression increases your rewards by 30% and your paying 6.5% fee why are complaining your still up by over 20%, if you dont wanna use it the original plotting wont magically stop working.
A lot of it is due to speed and the pummeling the website gets. Also its not Chia specific, the website was made to handle the pummeling it gets when 100k+ people constantly refresh their worker pages to see how much of that 500 eth block went to them.
Or the constant DDOS attacks. We were even hit with the Chinese government’s Great Cannon at about 30% of the size of what hit Google (not our website that was hit in that attack) . News Article
if your built to withstand that much, you must be bleeding money, after ETH merge id guess your income is down 90+%, is there any reason you dont just add loads of coins, RVN,XMR,FLUX,ERGO,KASPA etc. is it just too difficult/expensive to implement?
We generally base our math on gains versus losses. Adding coins and supporting servers for them versus how much we can make. Those coins may be profitable for miners, but at 5% of the network at 1% dev fee how much do we make? Other pools manage by using home servers/cheap servers or have hidden fees. We’re kind of set on using expensive af AWS servers and a 1% or less fee.
Our profit margin right now is -75% with no wage for Alex or me. We’re working to bring that up a bit but yeah no profits for a while.
This GPU plotter/harvester and compressed plots advancements is growing on me the more I learn about it.
I can see it working out while still keeping the fundamentals of Chia’s original PoST.
When it comes to Open-source vs Closed source… Open source is the only way to go. Maybe short term you only see no return. But open source projects in Chia will propel the chain ahead much faster than a bunch of competing closed source development. If Chia grows slow, guess what, your pool will grow slow.
But! If Chia grows fast than your pool will have more farmers to join your pool much quicker. Further more, if you got an awesome reputation among experienced Chia miners when the rush comes, you will get the majority of the new farmers when Chia takes off. Build trust and a good reputation. This takes time. And open source will be your friend.
Open source is a different animal. If you run it like a closed source project for revenue, you will totally fail.
Any how, Thanks to both you and MadMax for continuing to answer all our questions!
Compute and Architecture is important. Turing and later is quite a bit faster due to their improved architecture. 2080 ti is similar to 3070 ti maybe yes.
Obviously open source is the way to go, trust me I hate having to compile binaries. If I had enough money to live off, I would open source it for sure. In addition friends of mine spent over 200k on testing hardware and such, they would like to see a return on their investment also. With high risk investments like this, anything less than a 10x return is a failure really.
I can’t tell you how much time and energy I have spent in my life developing software without seeing a penny for it. I always had to go back and get a regular job to survive again, I really dont like doing that.