Official vs. Unofficial Pooling

Chia Pools
1

Hey Chia family,

Given that there is no such thing as “zero risk”, I think it is worth discussing the vulnerabilities of smart contracts on the Chia Network.

Until we have mature auditors as well as an auditing process for Chialisp vulnerabilities, everyone is taking a sizable risk and giving a lot of trust to one entity, which is the Chia team in this case.

In my article here, I draw out the fact that the Pre-Farm is held in a wallet and not a smart contract.
https://medium.com/@SuperMine_io/chia-pooling-for-the-uninitiated-official-vs-unofficial-pooling-608dc9633563

Why We Are Building Our Own Pool

There are a ton of farmers on mainnet who still have OG or the original plots which were introduced before Chia 1.2.0.

Farmers have to decide whether it is worth the opportunity cost to replot in order start earning rewards on the same space already plotted.

To support these original plots, we built our own Unofficial pooling.

We believe there will never be a reason to replot if you plan on continuously adding new space.

This is especially true if you are a large or enterprise scale farmer.

Apparently the Chia team believes in the security of a private key versus a smart contract.

You can see that here:
https://www.chiaexplorer.com/pre-farm

We are community-driven and have taken a lot of feedback from our Alpha testers to get a baseline for how the dashboard and client should operate.

We have built everything using AWS + Terraform. Our DDOS is secured by AWS Shield, which is a benefit of using Route53 and Cloudfront.

If necessary, we will add additional DDOS protection.

For these reasons, we will be able deliver a platform that supports multiple versions, does client-side validations, and simply gives people a reason to keep their OG plots.

Something is always better than nothing. Talk soon.

Mike AKA @AlphaQi

2

Once they move up the k people will have to replot. Remember that. And when you have to replot because u cannot use k32 anymore, everyone is gonna plot new pool plots just for flexibility useless it shows that pool or solo plots have a statistically higher / lower chance of winning xch.

1 Like
3

It’s a good point and something for everyone to consider even now.

If you’re going to replot, it’s a great idea to do k33 or k34.

We don’t support beyond k35 in the case that someone will cheat.

I can’t imagine anyone wanting bigger than a 1 TiB plot.

4

IMO, I always trust the official pool much more than the unofficial one. The pool can make promises as far as the sky and I don’t care at all.

I would rather trust the security implemented in the chain. If this fail, it means the coin fail. And it means I don’t have any business with this coin anymore.

5

Yeah that still changes nothing about the fact Chialisp is completely unproven and untested.

Let’s recall what happened with The DAO Attack on Ethereum.

Some external contract was called which changed the data used by a function.

Yes, this is stupid, but the Chia Network is not immune to these type of attacks.

It’s harder to drain a wallet than it is a* smart contract which is constantly executing code.

6

When they quit support k32, 85% of the entire 30EB chia space will evaporate, nobody is going to replot. Ever especially in China;

I don’t see it happening, hpool rules the pool space, nobody at hpool intends to replot, that’s +51% of the pool space, impossible for chia-net to do anything except FUD and post FUD-OPS

Yes, chia-lisp is an-untested mess, and by its very definition, lisp permits self-modifying code; The insanity of all this is going to make JS contracts on ETH look intelligent, while its well known that the only reason Vitalik did so, is that he was still young, and only knew js.

Lisp is now 70 years old, and never went anywhere, researched a lot in the 1990’s; I mean I like lisp, but I like APL too, so what?

…

I thought I was going to learn some thing about official vs un-official pools? NADA

Official-Pools are those pools blessed by chia-net, they were late, and full of bugs

Un-Official Pools like HPOOL were six months early, and bug-free, and had 90% of the wins for a long time.

…

Official Pool is just an attempt for Chia-Net to re-take control of their baby chia, its been a failure all along, now HPOOL supports both PP & OG; They let their users decide; & they don’t pay paid influencers to control the debate.

7

Hpool opened up a pool using pool plots and is encouraging its farmers to move over. The losses to scammers just increase as real ones move over which will encourage people to move over.

Nothing is 100%, I assume if there is a similar event then there will be a hard fork.

8

The idea with the article was to give people links/sources and let them decide for themselves.

The big thing to note is that funds are secured in a wallet with Unofficial pools.

Official pools of course use a smart contract which is immutable.

There is good and bad in that.

Someone posted on reddit showing how the total netspace is being farmed out.

Interesting how few people are in Official pools. Please correct if you believe the data is off.

9

HPOOL is NOT encouraging anybody to move, I’m here in China, and I don’t know any people who intend to replot or ‘move-over’ nada, it ain’t going to happen. There is no advantage to see something as STUPID as this.

I see today that all the 6PB ( fake ppl ) at space-pool are gone, yet the pool space is up. Go figure, they have split up the fake whales;

HPOOL has some natural ppl that are following the re-plot narrative, e.g. if your making new plots I see a tiny group < 1% making the new PP plots on HPOOL

For me I have quit buying HDD’s, I have quit making new plots, except to fill up my last drives with mad-max OG, if in time HPOOL quits processing my OG plots then I will quit mining Chia.

Flax is going to take over, and they will always support OG plots, because they’re not stupid.

There will always be clones & HPOOL that will always support OG plots.

The New PP plots aren’t even profitable; I study the HPOOL payouts in Detail and the space-pool for new PP plots, theyre’ paying out the exact same as OG.

There is no advantage on earth for the new plots;

Lastly the new PP plots haven’t even been tested yet. In the coming days your going to see massive attack on these new immature pools that have not a clue about security.

10

That’s easy POOLS are like 1/2 of the EB, these ‘solo’ operations in CHINA setup in March 2021, are $1M HDD farms with 100PB, so they don’t need to ‘pool’

At todays 30EB you would need 30PB to ‘solo’ , it takes 3PB just to win one xch/day, which is crap as the price is going to zero.

…

There is no point to this graph as its all known-knowns; The issue here is official vs un-official FUD, SOLO is irrelevant. The solo ppl at this point forward will always dominate until they PULL THE PLUG when the price of XCH falls below $50 USD, at that point $1/day (1,000plots) will not even pay the utility bills.

11

They are offering incentives to replot pool plots are move to their new pool so yes thats the definition of encouraging.

Hope to visit Beijing later this year and meetup with the members of the Chia wechat group :smiley: If your in it maybe we can grab a beer.

12

The incentives are BS; I have studied them, and I study the REAL payouts. Everything is the same. I’m talking real world. I have been on HPOOL since April 2021; I’m always studying their data.

Just like yesterday on space-pool they too have incentives; But none of the block awards to any of the whales could be confirmed; On HPOOL its worse their website has in-accurate information about the PP payouts, IMHO they’re just matching CHIA-NET BS with HPOOL BS and seeing who can be the king of BS.

HPOOL plays along with the narrative, they have given their users a choice, even offered ‘air-drops’ as an incentive.

LASTLY,

Activity period: The airdrop will last 5 days after the Chia pooling protocol is officially launched in Hpool.

It’s already over, so why talk about something that has already come&gone.

Thus the ‘incentive’ is over, so now the rush to PP ( its what they call NFT ) is gone.

https://www.ihpool.com/help/bulletin?title=Hpool-Chia-pp%20Pool%20：XCH%20Airdrop%20Activity

13

k32 is good enough. even Bram Cohen doesnt recommend k33 or k34

14

i had a look at your website. What is marketplace? what does it have and how does it work?

15

Well Flexpool.io still has airdrops going for a few days plus all their blocks are verifiable on our website just click the blocks page and the block number has a link. :smiley:

16

What’s with the 843 dot 4 digits? Is that 8432746 or 843 dot something?

17

did u get the memo that flexpool is not hpool?

who knows what air-drop promotion that flexpool is running, but hpool made it clear its only for 5 days after launch and it kaput

18

There has already been a hard fork ,there are now +500 chia-shit clones, flax is #1

The problem with a real ‘hard fork’ like bitoin and bitcoin-cash is that there you had billionaires who could promote both chains; But with chia, all the clones to date have been done in the garage by hackers, with no promotion and/or marketing.

If CHIA really did take off then there is a possiblity say that a key member of chia-net goes off and announces a ‘hard fork’ and get $50M USD to make it happen, but for right now chia is a joke and the price is going to zero, and there is zero use case for any of this crap.

So nobody in their right mind is going to financed a “Super Hard Fork” for chia-net, especially given that the classic is a failure and the NFT is a failure, eventually somebody at chia-net will get disgusted. But given they spend 1/2 their VC ($61M USD) on lawyers I think they got non-compete agreements on their staff that bridles them beyond death.

19

I’m humbled! Thanks for asking.

We have several ideas around bringing additional value to pool members.

It’s way too soon for us to reveal that! Maybe we can discuss it during an AMA.

20

It’s 843 dot something.

That’s in PiB and more than half I believe is in Space Pool.