Not winning any Chia coin for a year

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I am finally giving up on Chia, as I’ve got about 80TB of plots and haven’t won a single coin in about a year now. I check the logs and don’t see anything I recognize as wrong, like saying it’s over five seconds to query the plots. My estimated win time is 2 months, but I never win any Chia coin.

My setup is:

Windows 10
Chia v1.5, but I keep up with the latest whenever they post new versions.
I’m running a 16-bay server with a bunch of drives, a couple of HBA adapters. Seems pretty straight-up, no USB or network shares. I tried the network shares but got the over five second warning in the log.

After about six months, I thought maybe I needed to keep making new plots, so I farm full time and delete the oldest plot and then replace it with a new plot. I don’t know if that’s stupid or not, as either way the result is no wins.

Any suggestions?

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A couple of things to consider.

First, Chia does not make it easy to check health of the farm, so some monitoring tools usually help (e.g., ChiaDog that only works with logs (you can network read-only share them, so there is no security risk to your box), or farmr but this one basically needs a full access to your setup). Another option is PSChiaPlotter - the harvester monitoring part (also only works from logs), as this one gives quick feedback, although limited. Those tools give you various level of feedback but are much better than just eyeballing logs looking for some bad condition buried in a noise of worthless log lines.

The second is whether your plots are OG or NFTs. If you have OG plots, you were basically duped by Chia into plotting basically garbage (they make it a default option for god knows what reason other than incompetence) that makes monitoring more difficult. If you have NFTs, joining a pool would be really good, as you will get some feedback how your farm is doing (whether you have some stales, some other errors. With NFTs you can either self-pool, or join a pool, so it is up to you what works for you, there is no reason at all to produce / have OG plots anymore.

As far as being in a dry spell, several of us recently were pushing 5-6x ETW, although it is possible that it was related to a specific chia version (I think most, if not all went into that dry spell around upgrading to v1.3.x), although it could be just a weird correlation.

As you have no wins in a year, either you have some problems you are not aware about, or that is just a long dry spell. Checking some pools, I saw some of them having dry spells up to 8x (didn’t look too much, so potentially higher values are also there). From what you described you are at most at 6x, so sure it is something to worry about a lot, but may as well be just a bad luck

Having said that, I would really encourage you to join some pool, as you will get some feedback about your farm, plus regardless, whether you are lucky or not, you will be earning around 87% of what is expected in case your winning would always be on time.

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On your GUI’s “Plots” tab, there is a “Plots Passed Filter” column.
It should contain data such as “2 / 1000” with date info in the column on the right.
(where “2” would be the number of plots that passed the filter, and “1000” would be how many plots you have)

If you never see any plots passing your filter, then something is amiss.

I am running Chia 1.3.3 via Windows 10 Home.
My GUI likely does not have the same layout as your Chia 1.5 has. But I am guessing that you should have something similar that offers that information.

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I’m sure you can stop replotting, old(er) plots have as much chance of finding a proof as fresher ones.
And plotting takes energy and wear and tear on your equipment so you’ll only be of worse.

One time final replotting may be wise if you have been using OG plots up till now, you should replot to NFT then and join a pool.

Your 80TB equals some 72TiB for which you can expect monthly payout of some 0.7XCH from Space Pool. Payouts average on 0.098XCH/10TiB/Month currently, minus a small fee for the pool.
On top of that you would still have an equal chance of finding a full proof that will reward you with 0.25XCH. Less than the 2XCH when farming solo but the monthly payouts from the pool compensate for that and it’s a lot more rewarding to see some frequent results of your farming;-)
Bonus is that the pool will give you some statistics/feedback on your farm, as @Jacek said.
Any other decent pool than Space Pool will do, i’m just mentioning them because that’s what I use.

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It is not unusual to have 600-800% of the estimated time to win. So you are well within possible range. For me with 320tib i had no win from jan 18 to june 7.

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I was pooling with poolchia . com (site currently shows “Your base is under attack” which to me shows a lack of interest from those running the site) until recently went solo and also upgraded to 1.5 GUI. I’d be interested in how to see Proofs Found as there is no column for that on the plots tab of GUI. Can watch it scroll past on Farming tab but would love to see my stats per 24 hr or whatever. I only have 33 TiB but did win 3 blocks while pooling over the last few months. Now I’m doing solo I don’t know how to check my possibility of success.

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It’s on the Farming tab. Also the Estimated Time to Win for your farm. But in reality this could be many times higer (6-8 times being reported). I think you must have been very lucky to find 3 proofs in a couple of months, but that’s the other side of the farms finding much less than expected on average;-)

The Proofs Found column next to Plots Passed Filter is actually Partials Found in case of using a Pool.

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What’s this “base under attack” thing, in the first place?

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I think you should stop replotting.
Also make a few NFT plots and join a pool with them. Then the pool will accept/reject your partials and you may be able too see if there are any issues from that

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Sure … join a pool. You don’t mention if you are in a pool. With 80TB, you should be in a pool and you wouldn’t be so worried about if you had won a block. You would be getting paid either way.

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With 180tb I spent over 4 months with no wins and in the last 7 days got 3 chias, so yeah it’s really random.
Make sure in the logs the time to check plots are healthy. You can test the plots with the chia commands.

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Thanks for your comment. I didn’t realize there was even a difference between plots, OG versus NFT. I’ve been plotting for about six months, all OG, not realizing that was a huge mistake. I’ve joined a pool and started replotting with NFT plots. It will take about six months for me to replot everything, I’m estimating. The pool says I’ve got two solid plots so far, so that’s encouraging.

I think the main point is what you said: Chia fucking sucks at telling you when something is wrong. It needs to focus on that, otherwise people like myself will get discouraged and quit. Plus, it makes me angry that I have to become a Chia expert just to win a single coin. That should not be the case. Their UI is slick looking, but it doesn’t matter because there’s something wrong and it turns out you’re wasting your time and energy and it just silently continues to log problems (like the 5 second warning) and never tells you.

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There’s a “Plots Failed To Open” number, and mine shows 0. I’ve also run the plot checker command line and all passed. I also show “Plots with Missing Keys” as 0 and “Duplicate Plots” as 0.

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Great that you are switching to NFTs, and already got some good feedback from your pool. Also, make sure that you are using MadMax plotter, as the default one (provided by Chia) is another masterpiece (it really excels at being slow).

Although, keep an eye on chia new versions, as plot compression is coming, so we all will need to replot once more. (Maybe not so much “need to” but rather be forced to do it to keep up with the rest.)

By the way, take a look at PSChiaPlotter, especially that harvester activity (the last video there - Is Your Harvester Too SLOW to WIN Chia) - GitHub - MrPig91/PSChiaPlotter: A repo for powershell module that helps Chia Plotting. It is a Power Shell program (easy to install and run), and only looks at logs. The plot manager may not be good anymore (but was one of the best at that time.

Here is the link to ChiaDog - GitHub - martomi/chiadog: A watch dog providing a peace in mind that your Chia farm is running smoothly 24/7.. However, I have not installed the Win version, so cannot comment on that.

I use the first one from time to time (when in doubt), and a modified version of ChiaDog 24/7. Otherwise, you are kind of flying blind.

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Excellent advice, I will change my plotter and start checking out the utilities you mentioned. Thanks!

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By the way, if you are OK with the command line, you can use chia_plot.exe directly. It doesn’t require anything chia related (so you can copy it where it is convenient for you). Maybe this way, it will be easier to ask people what settings to use to get is started (heavily depends on your box(es)).

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I use the command line daily, so that’s no problem. I actually use JPSoft’s command line, which is awesome.

In any case, I’ve already started winning Chia coin from the pool I joined, with just 3 plots, which is something I should have done a year ago.

I switched to the MadMax plotter, which seems at least twice as fast, so maybe three months I’ll be able to replace all my OG plots with NFT plots. It’s so lame they don’t create NFT plots by default, or even pop up a warning, like, hey, this is dumb, just create an NFT plot. So much is wrong with that nice looking UI, it’s very deceiving.

Since my Chia machine is really old (built on the cheap), I plot on my main desktop and wrote a Windows service in C# that watches for new plots on my desktop and then finds the oldest plot on my Chia machine and replaces it with the new NFT plot. It works great, and means I can plot all I want and never run out of disk space, as I’m replacing plots, not adding them. But once I’ve got all my OG plots swapped out, I’ll stop plotting altogether.

Right now I’m trying to install ChiaDog, see what that’s all about.

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You can farm your OG plots at Foxy-Pool CHIA (OG) (foxypool.io) it’s safe, I and many others used it (there still 168PiB farmed there). I carried on using it until I replotted all my OG plots to NFT, I now use their NFT pool.

I have 304TiB of plots, last won two blocks back in March after a very long dry spell. Back in March I was 2 months ETW, now 16 days, but still no win, luckily I’m pooling so some XCH comes in every other day, but would be nice to have some wins to gain the 0.25XCH every now and again.

I’ve been farming since May 2021, I’ve always had far more plots than my brother, I’ve found six blocks, he’s found ten blocks, just the way the luck runs. Overall I’ve got more XCH because I’m pooling, and he’s solo.

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With 80TB it does not make sense to solo farm, join a pool and you will receive stable payouts plus “free” monitoring of your farm as the pool will likely have some kind of alarms you can receive or look at if no proofs are received.

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I am curious as to how much XCH comes in every other day, based on your farm size?

I am asking because:
– I have no clue when it comes to pooling.
– When hitting a block, some of the fees paid are beyond small (like 1/100000 of a penny).

If the every-other-day pool payouts are similar, then the XCH will never really add up to anything usable.

But I am assuming that the payouts are not that small, or people would not be pooling.

I am flying in the dark here, and would appreciate your letting me know how much XCH gets paid out, every other day, based on your 304 TiB farm.

Perhaps I should consider pooling? Don’t know, until I have a sense of the payouts.
(and I would have to re-plot – Argh!)