CHIA Brothers and Sisters,
I have put some money into this operation. I am doing about 10 TB a day plotting. I have about 400 TB that I have purchased. I am beginning to think that this was a huge mistake. The issue is the network growth. It is not slowing down. The issue is that for those of us that are looking to get our money back or potentially help make a living the rewards are starting to be almost meaningless.
On the advanced tab of the Chia calculator, If you want to get a reward a week, you need to hit about .00030 or .000030 of the nets pace growth. Lets just call it the 1 week mark. That is a good living. The issue is that at 10 tb a day, it takes several months at an eventual accumulation of3.7PB total storage before you finally hit that mark. Let me say that again, 3.7PB of storage, plotting 10 TB a day, with no interruptions. If you are plotting 8TB a day, I don’t think you hit that mark in a year. Then there is the issue of having to add plots to maintain that number.
There are a couple of Whales that are pulling down 30 percentish of the total rewards right now? Am I looking at that right? So here is the question, WHAT IS THE POINT? If you are a small farmer, your return on investment on a 300 dollar drive, 12 TB, no hardware for plotting or electricity spent, is how long… over a year for sure.
This netowrk in my opinion is at risk of becoming centralized, to where only the big fish will be able to make it. I was planning on going to a PB of storage, but my return on that at the current CHIA price on the advance tab is over a year, and all signs are pointing entering a bear market.
I am not blaming the Devs. There is no way that they could have expected the net space to grow this fast for this long. But lets be serious. If you have 50 to 100 TB, when will you ever see that money? I am guessing it will take way over 2 years including the money spent on a decent NVMe and other ancillary equipment.
This is not looking good, and I don’t think that pools will save the situation. A GPU mining rig, even at inflated prices looks like a better buy than the money that I am going to sink into this project. Not only that you can pivot from Etherium after it goes to proof of stake to another currency.
Please tell me that I am wrong.
If it is any consolation, many others have found themselves in the same position.
The amount of flak I have taken on this forum for farming in the cloud rather than buying hardware has been most amusing. History, of course, has proven me right.
You say you don’t blame the devs, but despite what they say publicly, this was very much part of the plan…
Mistakes are generally best fixed sooner rather than later. The market is about to become flooded with second hand storage.
I don’t think we should be banning people for sharing their experience. A forum that only allows opinions that it likes is not a useful or informative place to be. If you’re into that kind of thing, you might want to look at r/chia.
Why would you ban this? Its a legitimate discussion that needs to be had. Even if a farmer goes to a pool, what are the rewards? Buying a 1500 dollar overpriced GPU is a better investment right now than 1500 worth of HDD storage. The point of this thread is to discuss the issue, and see what the best options are. Is it better to plot to the cloud? Is is better to not plot at all? Is there something that needs to be changed in how the rewards are handed out?
If you buy 100 TB of external hard drives at 30 dollars a TB, that is 3000 dollars. What is the reward for that 100 TB on a pool… 10 dollars a day, 20 dollars a day who knows. At 10 dollars a day, you would be better off buying an ASIC miner and mining bitcoin, hence part of the issue.
I am all for the environmental reasons for mining CHIA, but I am not going to do it for a terrible ROI. Neither should you.
On a side note, one of the issue with American culture right now is silencing people who you disagree with. That limits ideas, which is where solutions come from .
Lets get this ball rolling. I would love to find out what the CHIA teams response to this is.
well if you just bought a few 3090’s a month ago at the insane price they go for these days expecting a good return on them, you would also be quite disappointed to see BTC and ETH drop like a stone and who knows what happens when Mr Tesla goes on twitter the next time.
Sure there’s a valid point there, at least for the time being ETH seems to be more profitable. But you don’t mine a new coin because it will give you an ROI within 30 days of launching on the market.
(for those who got in a mainnet launch or before actually did i suppose)
No Crypto coin will give you any guarantee, ever.
I started plotting 2 days after the markets went online, with the hardware I have, in a year or 2 I should still make 10-15 Chia even if current growth continues. That might just cover the cost of my hardware, it might be worthless or it could buy me a house 10 years from now.
Price might drop to 10 dollars/xch in the coming months, people might be leaving, or the other way around, you just don’t know.
But We all have to make our own choices depending on our own situations.
The thing is that Chia become too big too soon and for most of us it would have been much better if it had started off slowly with a price of 10 dollars and became successful later.
Then again, honestly, I would not have been here now, and regretted it later 
When I decided to start buying extra storage space I figured buy 100TB and plot it and see how things proceed and just delete the plots as I need the space. Everyone keeps hammering on about the network growth. When I decided to plot I plugged in a whole bunch of different scenarios. Even with network space growing exponentially till 40Eib and continuing to at 150PB a day after that I was still breaking even after a year.
I am eventually going to need the storage space anyway and I would need to plot multiple times the space I have to kill my SSD’s so I figured maybe it might pay for itself from farming. With Netspace still under 20EiB I am not to worried.
It’s the same discussion as before; without pooling and with this amount of network growth, the outlook is cloudy. Does it make sense to plot right now? Probably not!
This is your mistake.
I have 120 TB.
and it’s cost me $300/m and i can DROP IT at any moment.
i rent server.
How is this a repost? A repost from where? It’s not a duplicate of any discussion I see here.
Pooling would at least give some return - meanwhile those who have had rewards are quiet and those without rewards are upset. I have said before and i will say again - the plotting/farming cycle is fragile and it is SO easy to run for weeks only to find you have a SILENT fault - a pool would resolve this … and from what I heard on another thread - I am not holding my breath - TESTNET SOMETIME in June … lol
Statistically , flaky software and SILENT failures benefit the large SOLO farmers or pools - which is why HPOOL is so popular - you get to know you have problems far sooner
Most Important Rule of Investing: Never Invest Money You Can’t afford To Lose
I am plotting along with my meager hardware for solo mining while pools come online. Maybe its too little too late, but at least I have some skin in this game. Only time will tell if it was truly worth it.
Chia needs to become a platform to build upon, and we are all speculating that they will do that. Those that bulked up their storage and plotting may end up the winners of early and fast adoption.
May the plots be ever in your favor!
So In response to this and only invest what you cant lose… I am in that mindset. When I purchased my equipment I understood the risks. I am disappointed and alarmed at the network growth. The question is not about pools, pools will not solve an issue of how much a TB is worth, especially if we are getting ready to go into a Bear Market for the next 18-24 months.
I am wondering what the CHIA teams response to this thread is, and what their outlook for the currency is long term.
I am looking at CHIA as a long term investment. What does the CHIA team see in the future for
- Actual long term network growth prediction. Not holding you to it, but any idea’s?
- Project value and economic growth?
- Will there be any layer two solutions for the coin, where does the coin go from here to add value?
Lastly, how much of the network is made up of farmers that have less than 500 TB. Is the network growth from someone in China that has cheaper and better access to the supply chain and has made a mega farm or several mega farms ? Or is this growth from the community at large? Surly the team has the ability to know the answer to that question.
Is it worth it to buy new hard drives and start plotting/farming today? Probably not, unless/until the price of XCH goes up.
Will it lead to centralization? No, I don’t think so. In fact, it will be the opposite. More people will learn about Chia and set up farms using the space they already have, at a marginal cost of close to zero.
This was the plan all along; it’s just been more accelerated than expected.
Why idiots always repeat this BS “So In response to this and only invest what you cant lose”…
I don’t know.
Only idiots invest and and thinking about loosing.
I am looking at CHIA as a long term investment
bad idea. it’s crap, and it’s will go away in 3-4 months.
but now it’s time to make $ quick.
Can you explain why you feel this way?
Also a good way to stay broke. Using other peoples money is the golden rule.
You can’t underestimate greed. Sure the global hdd supply chain will ramp up next round. Refurbs may be all the rage too. But the scalper market is lying in wait too. Even if sudden price breaks allow new miners to enter with pools this pushes the alarming net space growth up even further compounding on the plot more to score issue. Too bad the proof of space over time wasn’t proportionally rationed by the age of each’s start in the chain (a variable hard cap). The longer you plot the more you are allowed to plot. A model where simultaneously having more and writing faster (POW) is irrelevant. Sure that doesn’t stop multiple registrations but those entries can’t cross share their plots which further divides hopes for stacking up as one giant farm space.
It is because there is no certainty in investing. Anything can go wrong along the way. But anyway, different strokes for different folks I guess.