Chris here from Buenos Aires. We have been mining with GPU before and we are discussing about setting up a chia farm, with plotting and farming hardware.
I’d like to ask you how would you distribute an investment of $20,000 usd in a chia farm, between the plotting hardware and the farming hardware…
Also, if you have any advice about the return… as the chia calculator is showing up a return of investment in about 1 month, it looks a bit unrealistic, or just too optimist lol.
The big variable is the netspace. It has grown far beyond the creators expectations. Currently at… (checking)… 8.7 EiB and growing fast. You’ll want to guess at the growth rate there before investing too much.
I’m not sure if I understand what you mean with chasing a carrot with a stick? is it that the network space will grow too fast, leaving us without reward?
yes. network growth is getting out of hand… price of hard drives gone up as much as 40% if you can get hold of them (16TB +) people with thousands of plots with 0 wins. if you do start, pooling is your best chance
chiacalculator can be miss leading if you don’t use it properly.
I am afraid 20k will not get you far if you are just starting. Hard drive prices have doubled, netscape has exploded and to catch you you need really powerful multicore machines to help you plot faster.
You will need 20k just to setup a decent plotting rig to be competitive at this point. This is without factoring in any hard disk storage. My guess is you will need a minimum of $85k investment to have a chance at this point.
Gold is looking good
Oil is looking good
If you re trading in cash buy gold look for a decent 20-25% return and cash out… By then this project will have some semblance of a direction, decide then…
Probably spend $4000 - $5000 to get 8TB/day of plotting capacity. Requires lots of ram, high-core CPU’s, and several 2TB NVME ssd’s. Those PCIE adapters that can take 4x m.2’s look good if you can find any, but just grab anything you can that accepts m.2 nvme!
And then spend the remaining $15000 on storage. Get as many 6TB and 8TB drives in the short term so your plotting can be stored on something, and also order as many 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB drives as you can afford and hope they arrive before all the 6TB / 8TB drives are full !
(I would order the 14TB / 16TB / 18TB drives immediately and pray they arrive in 3-4 weeks).
Look for motherboards with LOTS of SATA ports (data AND power!)
There is an empty 50-bay (3.5 inch!) chenbro JBOD chassis in my area on craigslist that I’m very curious about. If you know how to run enterprise kit like that it will probably simplify your operation if you can acquire some. For me though there’s too much I don’t know about that kind of equipment, I’m pretty sceptical that it might require lots of missing parts - doesn’t even have drive trays. Here’s the craigslist ad (Vancouver, BC, Canada): Chenbro 9U 50-bay Storage Center Server Chassis RM91250 with 2 Xeon...
And, do you have any answer about the possible return of investment? as zEeTv just mentioned that the https://chiacalculator.com/ may be a bit misleading?
It’s wrong, it’s completely misleading, meant for noobs, dupe them into thinking that they really stand a chance… Don’t use this, it will give you fake hope… Just read up around this project… You re better off waiting for the market crash with your savings held in Gold… When the market floors just buy the crypto and go to sleep…
I’d ignore the calculators. All that matters is this:
For the next 3 years Chia will distribute 4608 rewards (2 chia each) per day. Your chance of winning an award is supposed to be proportional to the amount of plots you have relative to the total amount available on the global chia network.
If the total distributed “plot” space averages 50,000 PB over the next 3 years (it’s currently at 10,000 PB), and you have 100TB of plots, you can expect to receive 20 chia over those 3 years.
As for what Chia will actually be worth? I have no idea. Personally I’m a little nervous that ransomware will somehow make crypto-coins illegal eventually… but if that stopped ransomware, maybe that would be a good thing overall for society.
I had to register to reply here. I wanted to use this weekend to get into CHIA mining. Reading this post made me rethink. If a 20k investment will not be worth it, should I even bother getting a system together if I want to invest less than 5k?
your best bet at the moment is buy a few 16+ TB hdd’s, if the pools that are planning to come out work out the hdd prices will sky rocket, either start farming then or sell your hdds ( aaahh basically become a scalper grrr why am i giving you this idea)
@ecopsorn if you have a decent pc just get a couple of hard drives (8TB +) ready till pools come out , DON’T PLOT YET
without a pool basically your buying a very expensive lottery ticket (or few lottery tickets)
Ah I see. You can win more with farming than buying then.
Just saw a comment in another thread where a farmer is saying they didn’t win anything in 14 days with 4000+ plots. I guess that’s the biggest issue with solo farming: if you have an unlucky streak you can never be sure if there’s something wrong with your setup or if it’s just luck. With an investment like $20K I would have to constantly check what’s going on which is distracting.
Pools will solve that issue but then you can’t earn as much probably.
Maybe a combination of both could work too: buy XCH with 5K and use the rest to invest into hardware. That way at least you would have guaranteed chia and you can sell the hardware later on if farming doesn’t work out.
It means I have 1400 plots (for over 2 weeks) and 0 XCH :). And now that I’ve slowed down the plotting my “number of days to win” is steadily climbing.
My religion biases towards storage but if you’re also generally into crypto mining, having more plotters could make sense
That said - if you have enough space/power, 4tb drives and 4u 24 or 4u 36 backplanes with modern mobos could be fine and don’t underestimate the power of parallel HDD farming (just don’t use RAID…). Or even with > 4tb if you can afford or are more power sensitive. If you’re hw savvy pick up 2-3 LSI SAS controllers and split the backplane but that seems to be an edge optimization for chia (vs. running database or actually useful storage of bits that people actually care about)
If you will have some use for the equipment (i.e. content/backups/etc) or are bullish on decentralized storage long term then it’s not like it’s $20k down the drain
Even if you’re waiting for supported pools, no reason not to plot/farm now if you already have machines with empty space
Just look at where the market is going right now, everyday the digital fairy-dust is loosing value. If I had that kind of money, I’d simply let the market crash, buy two or three different coins, and put them away in lock and key…of all the crypto, Chia is the most moronic setup, pushing the entire world onto an HDD rush and it will reward the biggest of all the fools…ROI wil go down from here on out for the next 5-8 years…
lol.
