So the answer is to join the biggest pool, which again goes against the decentralisation message.
It is a strange situation for sure, I am not sure what the answer is. Maybe put us all into a pool automatically haha
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Chia company, it’s that they’re really thought about everything very thoroughly. Pools are no exception (other than not getting them ready quickly enough).
The way pools will work in Chia is fundamentally different than the way any other cryptocurrency has done it. With Bitcoin pools, for example, the pool operator creates the blocks, so centralization is an issue. But with Chia pools, the farmers create the blocks. This is extremely important because there will be no centralization issues.
You can join the biggest pool if you want. In fact, there may only be a small handful of pools that succeed. It’s no problem at all. And if you join a pool that isn’t big enough to pay out rewards consistently, you can leave and join a bigger pool. They’ve thought of all of this, and it’ll be ready to go soon enough.
Really…
This sounds fishy. What prevents double farming?
I was initially interested in chia because of its “somewhat green” credentials. 2 years ago i joined in another project which used energy to maintain consensus - Resistance
It was a great idea as Resistance mining used Boinc - Proof Of Research - all that hard work at least went to a good cause - valuable scientific research. The project failed in the end because the CEO decided he would rather run off with the money than follow through on a good idea - people can be like that. I am not trying to make a point here other than it shared the aim of SPARE capacity in the network (in that case it was CPU power, in this case hard disk space)
They did, however, implement a pool on day 1 and your rewards were calculated based on completing calculations, which were 3-8 hours long, per core - so you were remunerated regularly
You hear the news - Tesla no longer accepting Bitcoin for Tesla vehicles - i reckon that should boost the top POS coins a little, along with a little love towards chia perhaps 
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There will be a “cool down” period to prevent this. So in other words, you declare your intention to leave the pool, and then you have to wait. I think the length is 30 minutes but don’t quote me on that. The protocol is still being finalized at any rate.
Incidentally, HPool apparently has no such protection, so rumor has it that farmers indeed are ripping them off by leaving before writing a block.
Is that a restriction inherent to the mechanism or is it superficially enforced by the dev’s code?
I think it will be part of Chia’s pool protocol, so it won’t be up to the pool’s operator to enforce. However, I could be wrong because the protocol isn’t quite finished. We’ll know in about five days exactly what it will look like.
Reverse engineering is always a thing, but we’ll see. Unless the pool goes through the dev’s end somehow.
How far behind the specification and chain support do you think pool implementations will be ? Are they developing based on interim information now or all waiting to see what comes out first ? I can’t imagine we all have pools on 17th next week
Oh, sorry for the confusion. On the 17th, the company is expected to finalize the protocol and put out a new release with the updated plot format that can be used for pooling.
There will be a lag of some weeks before any actual pools are ready to go. Several pools are currently being built, but these are external to the Chia company. The people building these pools will likely need some time to review the protocol in order to set up their pools.
You can start plotting so you’re ready for pools when the next release comes out.
If we start plotting for the new spec can we solo farm with those generated plots ahead of a pool turning up? Sorta like solo mining pool spec plots ?
Yes, you will be a “pool” of one until you decide to join a real pool.
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I was hoping they had made it like this, that is a very good thing.
Btw, thanks Dan for all the creal info