I was pretty shocked when I saw a video recently slamming chia based on their whopping…12TB farm. I had to try to bring some reasonable-ness to the table so rolled out what some real chia operations look like based on a 7K investment. Takeaway #1, cost of inputs (electric, disks, scale factor) has a HUGE bearing on the long term payback period of a farm and overall profitability. Lemme know what you think!
Everyone’s experience will be different. Your cost seems pretty low, esp for the 450TiB worth of drives plus rigs. That is roughly the size of my setup, and I’ve spent plenty more than that, in hi-cap drives, efficient hi-power plotter, and efficient mid-power farmer. Certainly not all necessary or even required to do the job, but the “cost of building fun stuff” and reaching for “perfection in both plotting & farming” may seem harder to justify initially…than buying used surplus small drives, along with used and inefficient past gen gear. But in the long run, it will pay bigger dividends.
Definitely agree that there is a “tipping point” where you need a certain amount of TiB farmed to make the whole effort pay off with more than chump change over time. And some big spends of hwd can pretty easily be reclaimed thru resale, helping ROI over time.
IMO, to make it all pay off, an efficient, turn key setup that just works and can be left on its own to generate revenue over time is what matters more than cheap up front costs. But that’s just me, everyone’s setup/results will vary, as I said.
I can say as a longer term crypto miner, I knew going in that buying drives at inflated prices would be the worst way to scale my farm (or any crypto operation that scales in unit costs to earnings) I also had ~60TiB of space when I started operations and several servers and the sc846 disk shelf that got me started. I have added a lot, but have not overpaid along the way. I am “cheap”. Resale is great, I dont know what happens if we see a mass dump of HDD’s (aside from me going hog wild buying as many as I can) to the overall market effect. I have lived through and mined during the 2018 gpu mining cycle and we saw cards that were 1000-1200 going for 350 on ebay.
wattage efficiency and long term planning for operations that need little assistance seems to be critical for long term success (not financial advice)
I am the one who asked you about 2698V4 on Youtube, but I can’t reply you, don’t know why
I agree that we have to make a long term plan, GPUs have problems, high power consume, high pressure on cooling system, noisy, and the most worst, GPUs can not survive from a 24x7 100% full load last for years, the first year should be OK, but next year, I think some of them will be broken
while, hard drive is power efficient, not that hot, less noise, and designed for a 24x7 work load, a disk can work 24x7 for many years easily
here in China MINING is announced ILLEGAL by the gov, ISP stop the connection of may ETH miners, and the gov double the price of electricity if you were catched mining ETH
Does that apply to farming too, or maybe you can farm no issue as the gov doesn’t see so much electricity use from farming? I normally have the most peers from China, like now - 24 out of 80 are there, more than anywhere else.
…but FARMING is ok ? 
are they coming after Chia Farmers?
currently Chinese gov only focus on ETH and GPU mining, if you use too much power or you are supposed to be mining ETH from analysing your network traffic by your ISP, you will get a warning, and you are asked to stop
chia is safe for now
they only focus on ETH currently, chia is safe for “now”
Didn’t watch the video but I also think at Chia farming might be more profitable than mining on my 3090 cards atm considering ROI if you buy now. If you ask me it’s about diversifying.
If you are in the EU, you prolly want to catch the most recent video. I included an EU general analysis also and you are correct. A basket is much more resilient (but BTC mining with an S19 in the EU will wreck you in the negs) ETH, CHIA and BTC Crypto Mining Profits - BTC Hammered - Chia most profitable in general EU 😲 - YouTube
Well, depends on your electricity prices.
I do both GPU and CHIA, there’s no way you can argue CHIA is more profitable even at electrical cost at .30 cents.
One 16TB drive at around $265 dollars each makes about 25cents per day not counting any electrical costs, that’s about a 1000 days ROI. (Pulled from flexpool’s estimated profitability data for 100TB of plots)
ETH consensus layer aside (we all know how unreliable when POS launches…), for around $350-$380 you can pick-up an AMD RX 6600 right now and make about 78-80cents per day AFTER .30 electrical costs and ROI in under 500 days.
I feel like in your videos when doing comparisons, you don’t actually know much about the GPU mining market so it’s kind of silly IMO. Maybe you should throw a GPU rig together… for content purposes, run the numbers and profitability and then see what the actual results provide.
In my opinion profitability should not come into it. The kWh cost per transaction of any GPU based crypto currency is so out of this world that I question the sanity of anyone subscribing to its use in any form unless your goal is environmental destruction. They say a single eth transaction costs more in power than over 100,000 visa transactions and we are into the hundreds of kWhs for that, if you presented that as a design in any reasonable business you’d be laughed out of the door as a total crackpot.
Chia is needed to challenge this, there are many ways this could evolve to super low power pockets of highly distributed farming. If you believe crypto currencies are a good thing for the world then the focus should be on how to provide this capability at a more reasonable environmental cost.
I don’t give a crap about the environmental cost if it’s not making any money -says every miner out there.
every pool i used was encrypted. how they find out? I used to even had proxy on German Hetzner. As long as Internet works, they cannot stop you 