At xxxx Eastern time NoSSD became the first Chia pool to ever reach 7 EiB. Congratulations to NoSSD, this high-performance plotter/farmer is the simplest and most reliable piece of software related to Chia that I have ever used!
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It’s a shame that this centralisation could potentially harm Chia though, so nothing to be pleased about in my opinion.
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Only CNI to blame for that, they were offered the technology up front at the very beginning and gave them a cheapo offer. Everyone laughed at NoSSD when they started their pool. No one laughing now, best tech usually rises above others, especially when it makes money. Imagine if CNI had bought the tech and put it directly into the Chia app. Instead look where their compression technology is at today.
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing, everyone knows that NoSSD didn’t go about it in a very good way at the start, not surprising CNI didn’t take them up on the offer, so I think NoSSD are also to blame.
I agree CNI should of bought the technology, but that’s only with what we know now.
Ultimately though NoSSD being effectively a single farmer is potentially a problem, which ultimately could affect the value of XCH.
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That what you and I know now, but back then NoSSD Team knew exactly what they had, no hindsight required, and if CNI were not smart enough to understand what NoSSD developed that’s on CNI.
I remember the public part of the negotiations well, NoSSD were outright insulated with a lowball offer and initially CNI were publicly insinuating that NoSSD were scammers, just like they initially did to Max. Now they seem to be having some issues with Max again. I remember how terrible CNI were to The Chia Plot website at first as well, threatening them with lawyers. Not sure it’s NoSSD that is the problem.
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This problem started a long time ago. We all knew that something like that will happen when Flex released their FlexFarmer (early in 2021). Right after that CNI should be looking for something like CHIP-22. Instead, they preferred to sit on their hands and viciously attack those that offered superior tech (Flex included).
Right now, NoSSD sits on 7EB and GH potentially on 12EB, so CNI was caught with their pants down and is more or less begging both Max and NoSSD to support their CHIP-22 development.
Not much is needed to imagine one of the smaller pools (e.g., xchpool.org or frogpool.io) acquiring FlexFarmer code from Flex, and partnering with Max, thus providing farmer-less client similar to NoSSD.
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Hmm is NoSSD trustfull? Is there any contact/person or team in public visible?
Nothing is known about the team. There were some speculations that they are either from Russia or China (my feeling is that they are most likely from Russia).
People that analyzed the code found there bittorent lib and there were requests from folks to remove it, but I don’t think that they complied (refused for basically no reason; I would just to squash such talks). However, having the binary running means that libtorrent is more or less a small coding shortcut, as basically the code can download and run whatever it wants anyway. So, really only trust matters here, not much scrutinizing the code.
Whether they are trustful, it really depends on your threshold. (I am team GH, as they don’t meet mine.)
As far as technology, they were the first to bring it out and it is solid - they are the leaders. GH is not [yet] there (but close enough for me).
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GH isn’t a pool. GH isn’t a single entity signing blocks (but who knows what the closed source does)
I use nossd. I know it is bad but just don’t want to run a node.
What’s even worse is I used an ssd for all my nossd plotting
You don’t have to!
Use Foxy Farmer, you can use GH, BB or even good old OG plots, farm to a pool and absolutely no need for a Node.
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I don’t see how they can been trusted, you need to know someone to trust them, however I think they must have a huge income from NoSSD, and it would at this stage be really stupid to do anything to rock the boat.
I don’t trust them, and I don’t agree with the single node, therefore I’m also team GH.
Sorry, but I don’t think that I wrote that it is a pool. I only stated that Flex already had GH FlexFarmer, so the work needed to make it is already done (and some smaller pools may be desperate to get it working again). Some people prefer to run the full system, some would rather not have the node to be running. I am not arguing one vs. another, just stating that basically all the pieces are already there and those two harvesters sit on over 20EB of netspace. Although, netspace dosn’t correlate with node count, so this point is rather mute (e.g., Space Pool has 10x more farmers than NoSSD).
I used before FF as a backup solution. Mainly, I couldn’t stomach the logs and a lack of tools to monitor the system.
For me, that the fact that they put so much work into it speaks more than the financials. Still, I am team GH as they don’t meet my safety/trust threshold.
Actually, when they just started (still were viciously attacked), I sent them PM about partnering with Space Pool / Flex or Max to overcome the trust issue.
I just read about Foxy Farmer. Isn’t it also a single node solution? Are they signing blocks with your keys?
Good question, I’ve asked on their Discord.
Unless they are State-sponsored. You can imagine the potential consequences.
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That’s entirely possible, and yes the consequences could be bad, but their pool says 1865 addresses and 6168 workers, I expect there is far more compromised computers out there, so comparably a small amount but could still be used to increase a botnets size.
All hypothetical of course.
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The farmer is signing the blocks, not Foxy.
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I see. I missed this document about that Chia Farming Gateway - Foxy Docs.
Although, as far as the node count, it is still a single node solution, so basically the same as NoSSD (and previously FlexFarmer). The difference is that I think to run that Foxy Farmer, there may be actually no need to run any of their software locally (just that change in the config.yaml to point the farmer to their node should be enough). Although, not sure how they take care of certs to match (what usually is done by “chia init …”).
Its a bit beyond me to be honest, I used Foxy Farmer and Foxy Farmer GH when I replotted from BB, as GH didn’t support BB plots at that point in time, I’m now running a full GH node.
But this does show there are options if you don’t want to run a full node.
Yes, it looks like a good solution. Not sure why it is not more popular. Also, not sure but looks like it can allow to run farms completely off of things like RPis.
Actually, this solution (single node / multiple farmers) is/was explained in Chia docs (remember reading it long time ago). However, for home setups a single node+farmer and multiple harvesters is a much better / cleaner approach; therefore, the former didn’t have much pickup because of it. (I really cannot find it on chia site anymore, even their architecture doc doesn’t mention it right now - Architecture Overview | Chia Documentation)
Anyway, this is a brief full node doc from chia - Full Nodes | Chia Documentation (thee key from there is “validate the blockchain”; but #5 talks about farmers in plural, but it is a weak statement easy to miss). So, we should really not comment on NoSSD as the “consensus” offending solutions by running a single node, as it does what the original architecture described and also others are basically doing the same thing, but with a bit less success (e.g., Foxy Pool with their F. Farmer).
My position about that consensus issue is that this is on Chia to address it potentially incentivizing running pure nodes (no farmer / harvester) by making those also earn some small amount of XCH (so folks could run them when their boxes are up during the day - yes, payment side looks convoluted, but they had 2 years to work on it (since FlexFarmer introduction)).
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