OpenChia.io: good pool?

Chia Pools
1

Hey all,

I’m a small farmer, so I like pools without a minimum payout. My first pool was EcoChia, which ended up having a mini-scandal, so I’m just checking whether OpenChia.io is all good.

Is there any advantage to the big pools (SpacePool, Flexpool, etc.)? It seems to me that OpenChia has the advantages of 1) immediate payouts, and 2) open source (if you believe that makes it more secure), and it’s not so small that wins are irregular/sporadic, so I’m wondering if there’s any downside I don’t know about.

Put as a broader question: if two pools aren’t cheating and don’t get hacked, and have the same fee and payout structure, there’s no real reason to choose one or the other, is that right?

2

I just looked quickly, but at first glance OpenChia appears to be an excellent choice.

“Official Pool Protocol, All our software is open source, No minimum payout, 1% fee, Full blown explorer and live logs.”

I did not do an in depth check. If I missed something I am sure other users will point it out, but no red flags for me.

3

Rather the opposite. By joining big pools, one is helping to monopolize pools functionality. We have already seen few smaller pools going out of business.

Luck averages over time. Therefore, for small pools if they are lucky at some point, the results will be better for a longer time. Of course, the same applies if a pool is unlucky.

For some time I belonged to OpenChia - for me, it is a good pool, but the website could be improved (or I didn’t use it properly). Maybe the biggest advantage (for small farmers) is the fact that there is no minimum payment.

4

Why join a pool with 1% while there are pools with 0% fee? (for the time being).

Many pools have payout as low as 0.01 XCH. Beware of those who offer payout for each transaction. As soon as (if ever) Chia gets to a point that transactions have fee, these tiny payout schemes will stop working.

5

That is a rhetorical question I guess.

When you go to work, you do expect to be paid, don’t you? Pool operators at some point also need to be paid, even if to cover their server charges. When 0% fee is standard, that makes those operators to look for other ways to monetize. One is to put some garbage on their pages, the other to manipulate payments. The first is basically an invitation for fraud through those ads, the second is fraud by operators. I guess, both are not what you want to see.

As far as transaction fees, that is where pools should have better settings when you want to be paid. As some people indicated, for some it could be once a month, or once a day, or some minimum that will make sense with those fees. So, recent announcement by Space pool about an option to be paid once a day is a good example.

6

Does the 0% fee pool use official pool protocol? Is their client open source? Do they have a minimum payout and if so, how high? Does the pool appear to have the necessary technical expertise?

Equally important, why would you expect a pool to perform well in the long run if they do not have a fee? Any pool needs an income if they hope to provide a good, ongoing service.

There are many good reasons to choose a pool charging a 1% fee over a pool charging 0%.

2 Likes
7

Hello,
Thank you for Your feedback, we want to make our website and functions as intuitive as possible. If you have any ideas, how we could improve farmer experience, we will gladly add it.

Jan from openchia.io

8

So being a former pool op myself, unless the pools that have no fees are getting a steady income of donations, that pool is most likely going to disappear in less than a year. Also, Id bet some serious cash that they are hosting on some cheap VPS.

Most miners seem to ignore the fact that just like they have operational costs to mine, pool ops also have a cost. And the bigger the pool, the bigger the cost. At my pools peak, I was right around 5k a month in server fees.

Ive pointed my plots over, happy farming to all

1 Like
9

I must disagree with what you just said. We dont use cheap VPS and we have no intention of stopping - pool is growing steadily, because more and more farmers see our pros. Unless you ran spacepool i dont see how you could spend 5k a month.

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10

I am French I will come to you with 700 plots for the moment we will see what your pool gives. If this is the top I will bring out 1000 plots of core pool for your home.

11

I didnt say you were running on a cheap vps… I was saying there are a lot of pools that host on cheap VPS as the pool ops think running a pool is a get rich quick scheme.

I ran multiple yiimp servers with multiple stratums around the globe and was running almost 200 alt coins and was using IBM services.

12

Yo, I think you made the right decision! Rather than helping monopolize pools functionality (as someone mentioned earlier) by joining to massive pools, it’s better to join some smaller pools. I personally support that idea, that’s why I joined findchia recently and I think that’s really great that we all can decide the pool we want to farm chia with!

And also if two pools have the same fees and so on, it doesn’t really matter where would you join (but don’t forget about design, quality of technical support or just is interface suitable for you - that could bring you more pleasure and less stress in the future).

13

Steady income is indeed required! We’re over 30k monthly now.

14

I don’t think this thread is appropriate to focus on what changes farmers would like to see. Maybe it would be better to start a new thread.

Saying that, IMO you face two issues. First is your poos size / growth. At this point you are at ~3TB and not really growing too much. Also, on your website there are four people listed behind this project. If you will not address the growth problem, I doubt you will be able to make it. As you have already noticed, to some people 1% fee is a problem. As much as I understand that you need to be paid, my take is that having that fee in your stage is a mistake.

Of course, the second is what you have on your website.

It has been a while since I left your pool. Although, just checking your leaderboard, I looked at Eda CZ. It is a small farm (~130TB); however, that farm has about 20% failed partials. In three places you point to those failed partials, but in neither one you provide a link how to address that. Just on that farmer, you lost ~26TB of plots. Doesn’t it bother you?

Looking at the tables you have there, I don’t understand why you think that YOU know how many rows needs to be there. Usually, there should be an option for the end user to specify such number(s). Also, having any table, the obvious thing is to provide CSV downloads, and that is missing as well.

I would also like to see to specify how my payouts are being made, not just by amount, but also by value (e.g., once a day/week/month, if some minimum is met). The fact that you can pay now on per each block rate potentially only works for you because your pool is still small.

As far as charts, you only have one, and again YOU are the authority to specify the timeline. I would like to see not just the last 24h, but potentially the last month, or everything that I did since joining your pool.

Again, I am not using your pool, so sorry but that is just a quick glance at what you have there. Also, I personally don’t like Discord. I posted something on your github Issues page (while being with your pool), and it was marked as "enhancement’ some time ago, but nothing has been done about it. So, one thing is asking for feedback, another reacting to it. Maybe a good start would be to address those issues there (github)?

15

We appreciate the feedback.

Feature wise if you look at many of the pools out there, the big majority doesn’t have half of the features we have but yet they have dozens of times more pool space than us, so its hard to think whatever you pointed being the reason for it.

We will try to continue to improve nevertheless.

16

I think you got it wrong. You asked me for feedback, and I said what I would like to see being changed. It was not meant to give you a silver bullet to address your business / growth problems.

Although, as mentioned, I left your pool, partially due to issues like I mentioned. So, again you can bang on my feedback, but the point is that I already left, and you are not helping yourself by trying to jump on me right now.

Anyway, good luck with your pool.

17

I am not jumping on you, I suggest you read my post again.

I simply made a comment regarding the features of other pools compared to ours. Your feedback is being taken into consideration.