I dont know what to do anymore

Chia Farming & Harvesting
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I have a weird story, and I would love to hear what you guys think I should do.

me and 5 other investors have gathered some money 3 years ago and decided to purchase bunch of drives and hardware and farm Chia, we managed to do that and have farmed around 500 xch. on 3 PIB hardware.

out of no where beginning of this year , upon checking the balance, I noticed it was all gone, I have no idea how that happened, it was very disappointing to see years work gone just like that. I have no idea how that happened, only I and another guy from the investors have the wallet pass phrase to access it, and I came in term with either I or him got hacked and the seed phrase was leaked.

we were farming on space pool, I know it was not my friend but I fully trust him plus he doesn’t really need 500 xch. It wouldn’t make a dent in his life.

here are my questions:

1- Could it be possible that the network or the pool been compromised ? or was it 100% our fault?

2- I have had the harvesters all shut down for over 2 month doing nothing until I figure out what happened and deal with the security issue that we have. what would be your ideal way to come back at harvesting ? is replotting all the drives necessary? sorry for such a noob question, I am out of touch since all I did the past few years is start the harvesters.

3-the drives are connected to 8 farmers via USB enclosures, and this was a bad choice from the beginning. I told my friend and other investors, if we were going to harvest again, we need to go the JBOD route. and that would cost us around 9000 USD, so it will take around 9 months just to ROI the JBODs costs alone. My question is, is it worth it? should I give it another try ? or should I just try to sell the hardware that we got at a loss and call it a day? what would you do ?

Thanks

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Sorry to hear about your loss, loosing that much must be really gut wrenching.

If you post the wallet address someone may be able to see where it’s gone, but that in no way will get it back, just shed a little bit of light on it.

This has happened quite often, it could be a program you’ve run that’s stolen the keys, someone with access to the farmer machine, or where the keys were stored, was you sending the XCH to a cold wallet?

As for how to move forward, you could move to compressed plots, but that would also mean buying GPUs, to plot and farm with. Remember rewards have now halved

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  1. Any thing is possible; however, the probability “that the entire network or pool has been compromised” is extremely low. IMO

  2. PoST, since you have the hardware already and unless your are planning to sell if NOT then I would reformat all CPUs, reinstall fresh copies of OS and most recent Chia software 2.2.1 directly from the Chia.net website… getting the farm back online after doing a hard reset on the routers too. IMO

Plus disconnect everything else from the network including turning off any WiFi access. There’s others in the Discord and this Forum that can better help with the technical troubleshooting. Those are the initial suggestions that come to mine.

  1. Only you and the 5 other investors can decide if it’s still worth it. Could still test the used market by posting the farm for sale to see what type of inquiries/offers are received while still farming to a new (secondary) wallet address that’s a cold wallet completely separate from your also NEW hot mining wallet address (primary).

Then again if you rush to get 3PiB farm back online with all 5 folks in agreement to proceed, might miss something critical or a new venerability. It might be hard to gain green light from all 5 miners too.

Sorry to hear so much was stolen definitely post old farmer wallet or Launcher ID so folks can research it further.

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Give us the wallet address.
Then we can see more

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@samih22 Sorry to hear about your loss.

If you decide to go forward, then I suggest you take the following safety precautions (in case you were not).

– Do not keep your 24 words on any internet connected device. I printed mine, and buried it (in a manner of speaking). A safe deposit box for your 24 words printout would be a good storage place.

– On your Chia boxes, use it for nothing other than Chia. On mine, I never even started the browser. For example, I visit this forum using a computer that has nothing Chia related on it.

– On your Chia boxes, install nothing, whatsoever, other than Chia. I used a different (but clean) non Chia box to download Chia, put the exe file (mine is Windows) on a thumb drive, and used that thumb drive to install Chia on my Chia boxes.

– Keep your Chia machines in a secure location, where no one can walk up to them and perform an XCH send, or install malware, etc.

– Ensure that you have a strong password on your Chia boxes, so that no one can walk up and run “chia keys show …”, and get your 24 words.

– If someone has physical access to your Chia boxes, they could clone your Chia drive, boot up a different machine, and get your 24 words.

– Reinstall your OS, from Microsoft, or an official Linux distro site.

– Download Chia only from chia.net. Check the hash value of the file you downloaded.
chia.net lists what the value should be.

– If you have other computers on the same local network, that is a security risk. A child on some other computer on the local network can get malware, and now that child’s computer can access your Chia computer.

Keep your Chia computers behind a firewall, so that no other non Chia computers can access your Chia computers.

– Create a new wallet / new 24 words. That will be the case, if you install Chia on a freshly installed OS.

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Sorry for what you have had happen to you. Some good advice above on starting over.

But… Not sure what size drives you have, but 8 PCs seems excessive for a 3TB farm. Cutting that to perhaps 2 or 3 PCs max would save quite a bit on overhead and equipment that you could sell.

I’ve had 1.4PB of USB connected drives on one PC, and it was far from being overloaded. And that is on older hardware. It used 14, 18, 20TB drives BTW, or about 80+ drives total. Don’t get why spending 9K$ on new hdw makes any sense, considering.

Nowadays with even moderate so called “plot compression” you could have the same 3PB ‘effective space’ with far less drives. All you need do is replot to the new format and have a suitable GPU in each harvester(s).

I have done that and have approx 1/2 the drives with the same ‘effective space’ farmed., again all USB with no issues at all.

Alternatively, depending on how ‘all-in’ you are on Chia, you could recoup some of the investment by selling it all and calling it a lost cause. With the halving / reduced rewards, and coming plot filter change, that’s certainly a consideration, if restarting the whole thing right now.

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A lot of those risks can be mitigated by using a cold wallet. My farmer is on my local network, it’s a server which carries out other duties as well, but I send my XCH to a cold wallet. Cold wallet keys have never been seen by my server.

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Absolutely farm to a cold wallet(s). That doesn’t mean you don’t have to still monitor things but it will prevent the worst of the worst happening, like in this case.

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for anyone that wants to check, here is the address:

xch1l7cwdh3e5n9mfvwarzc667ed6fzz9wx3kcxmn80seej7w0pql7mqzhvhm7

let me know what you think.

I was a few days late to notice the balance was gone, in those few days the harvesters were working and what ever small amount that was harvested was stolen too.

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address posted above

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my drives are mostly 14 TB drives , some are 12 and 10 TB.

you are right, and thats why I am heasitate to restart, knowing about the halving and the plot filter change does not motivate me to restart this project.

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Just my opinion on that issue (could b wrong), but if you cut rewards by 2 (already happened), then double the plot filter so x2 plots are looked at (Junish time) , then more or less your rewards equal out. The only real downside to that is it take more work to get the same result…i.e., more compute and/or GPU.

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Thank you to everyone that responded to this topic, I appreciate all your comments and suggestions
moving forward, I will:
1- have two wallets , hot wallet for daily mining and cold wallet for storage only.
2- have all computers formatted with clean OS.
3- dedicate a new internet network just for chia, with no wifi or access or any other computers, most likely ill get a 5G modem with a simcard.

if anyone can find any details on how this all happened from the address I provided above, would appreciate sharing your thoughts, I know there is no way I can get the XCH back. But it would still be good to know.

again , thanks to everyone.

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Please reach out to the official chia team on the official discord.
you can find the discord link in the footer of the official webpage:

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I recommend you to reach out to rigidity on there. Hes from the chia team and has his own blockchain scanner implementation which he can use to scan your public key for your coins and transfer them to a different wallet if nessesary

some questions to access the information:

  • is the wallet balance gone on BOTH wallets? Your friend and yours?
  • did you try to resync the wallet database?
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  • did you try to increase the derivation index? (please do so carefully)
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  • did you actually found outgoing transactions? The coins dont just vanish into thin air.

in case you collected 500 XCH and depending on your payout settings, you might have a vast amount of small coins collected, which can bug out the wallet client.
I’ve had this happen to me as a fund manager. It is therefore beneficial to collect coins in the farming wallet and from there transfer the sum to a storage wallet from time to time. This also merges the small farming coins into bigger coins, aside from the security benefits.

Please post your Derivation Index.

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Update:

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There you go. Its likely Gone forever (except your friend or you sent it to a different or the same wallet)

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If you search for your wallet address on http://xchscan.com, you can see some large transfers back in early Jan.

Gah! Beaten by mere seconds!

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The secret when it comes to farming or mining is, allways have a cold storage where you can transfer your coins. For JBOD, SAS hubs are cheap 30 dollar per hub and you can connect 20 drives. If you have a 3d Printer you can print the mounts for multiple drives, then attach it to a woodenplate with power supply. Don’t forget to add fans.

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Derivation Index is default , have not changed anything. Going to reach rigidity on discord, thank you for all the effort you put into your reply.

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I like this approach , Can you add me in discord , I would love to chat with you about this “.patapon”

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Why not just talk here, which Discord you want to join?