Where do you get the right to condescendingly tell someone they should stop commenting? You are not a moderator. You are a peep looking to win a few arguments.
When confronted with facts and reality you tell people to stop talking.
You seem to think that your freedom of speech and your right to a profit are both very important.
In opposition, you seem to think you have the right to decide other’s rights for their speech and profit.
Stop tilting at windmills.
Bro,
this place is actually one of the most friendly place in the Internet I have seen recently. Everyone supports each other, we calculate, estimate and solve problems together, but posts like this are pretty annoying -
**If You would be a “data center”, if You would see such a post You would definietely say: **
"What is going on here. I take a lot of risk mining Chia with thousands of investment and count, that Chia price will not fall below my breakeven and someone come out and say that he wan’t to steal my Chia, because he can’t earn on that".
Think about it.
Personally I want to do this for years to come… I never wanted to sell anything for at least 7 years!! This is not the point, like I said, the problem is I won’t be able to do that if the network will become centralized. If that happens we will all depend on whoever controls the majority of the network…
Those people will control the value of the chia you mined and could even attack the network itself if they wanted to. BUT hey… what do I know??
bait bait bait, I’m muting this topic now 
So will I. Take care
You do not understand the purpose, use or results of a 51% attack. I am not worried that hpool or Chia official pool (when it eventually arrives …) is going to shoot itself in the head by crippling the cow it is milking.
You try to win followers by inciting fear.
Your original basic concept of Reward/Penalty System is all about tilting the table in your favor with no concern for how this affects others.
Your side arguments are just diversions down the rabbit hole.
I’m outta here too! 
Have fun folks!
Lol somebody needs to invent ‘proof of identity’ using passpord/ID real quick so every person on earth has their fair reward rate 
I’m just coming back to this thread after stepping away from a day. Apologies to all for ripping the bandage off the wound, but I think this is an important topic. Many people have the same concerns as Morningcoffee and we should really clarify them.
TLDR:
Yes, this is true. It’s called “capitalism” and the same principle also exists in Bitcoin and Ethereum mining.
You had it exactly right with respect to the small farmers, but you’re still not quite seeing the bigger picture. Corporations (ie Whales) are not somehow exempt from the rules of capitalism. There are no economies of scale in Chia because the only “ASIC” that exists for storage is a hard drive. In fact, the whales have extra expenses because they have to pay warehousing costs.
To put it more simply, a whale’s cost per TB is higher than a fish’s cost per TB.
This. Excellent analogy. Except imagine that you are able to store your lottery tickets in your pocket, but the “big guy” has so many tickets, he has to rent a room to store them. His cost per ticket is actually higher than yours.
He’s talking about changing Chia’s reward structure, and he’s correct. Lucky for all of us, Chia (the company) does not have this power. As soon as the genesis block was created on March 17, the protocol was written in stone. None of us can change it, including Chia itself. They (and anyone else) can develop on Layer 2. They can do soft forks. But they cannot do a hard fork and still call it Chia.
As mentioned before, the code is open source so anyone can do a hard fork and change the reward structure. But it will no longer be Chia.
Agreed, but I’m going to turn the argument on its head here. Chia is fair. It’s as fair as it can possibly be. After smoothing out the luck, you’ll win a linearly proportional amount of Chia according to the amount you put in. Yes, the fact that there is luck (i.e. short-term fluctuation) means that it can appear unfair, but this is only true in the short term. And pools will smooth out this luck. Chia is fair.
I understand that you think the network either currently is, or will be, centralized. Where are you getting this idea from? The only two arguments I’ve seen so far are HPool and Whales. HPool will switch to the official pooling protocol and I’ve just shown why the Whales argument isn’t correct.
Do you have any other data to show that Chia either is, or will be, centralized?
Are we sure? I don’t know, I’m just asking. I understand how blockchains work (in detail). But I don’t yet know the in and outs of how the chia blockchain works and how they run governance.
You say the company can’t do anything… they pay the engineers. I’m not sure if they have control over the farmers like the Ethereum team has over the ETH miners.
Governance of Chia is a blackbox. In a recent interview Bram said something like…
“We don’t need governance, there are not a lot of changes”
but he also said…
“Pre-farm is needed because we need to keep paying engineers.”
I’m not sure what they need engineers for if they are not making a lot of changes. Obviously his first answer was not a great answer and not accurate.
He’s not the greatest at explaining this stuff to the general public. Here’s my take:
“We don’t need governance, there are not a lot of changes”
This is essentially what I was saying. The proofs, rewards distribution, emission schedule, etc are all baked into the protocol, which won’t change. This is why they don’t need governance. The only way to change these things would be with a hard fork, and then it would no longer be Chia. I know Ethereum is OK with doing hard forks, but Chia isn’t. Ultimately you do need to trust them on this, but Bram/Gene have stated “no hard forks” many times and I don’t see any reason not to believe them.
“Pre-farm is needed because we need to keep paying engineers.”
Here he’s mostly talking about Layer 2. For now they’re actively developing the portable plots and pooling protocol, and there’s a lot more work to be done to build a feature-rich cryptocurrency. Eventually they plan to transition to a more services-based company; I’m sure we’ll find out more about their business model as the IPO approaches.
The only time the protocol is frozen is where there are multiple independent developers (Bitcoin) or multiple independent clients (Ethereum). Decentralized development (bitcoin and more so Ethereum) is not the same as decentralized consensus (chia)
They can throw a soft fork in any time at all - and you would not know it unless there are developers studying each version of the source as it is releases. Hard forks are easier to detect as the blocks and contents diverge. Even then in a chain with few developers watching and no tools looking for it, it might be possible for the chain to fork with few people noticing for some time - it is really only when you try to transfer assets across forks that you would detect it easily
“won’t change” and “can’t change” are not the same
I think a better term (and less misleading) is “no need to change”
Right, but keep in mind we’re not talking about making small changes. The entire point of this thread was to modify the consensus and rewards distribution by requiring higher proofs from big farmers and/or lower proofs from small farmers. This type of change would require a hard fork, correct?
I agree the company has a lot of power over this but they have stated their position on hard forks many times. That said, “no need to change” sounds good to me.
Yeah i was being a bit pedantic … lol. Personally i don’t think skewing the rewards towards smaller/larger farmers is fair and/or even possible
What i do believe is that the indirect affects of UNRELIABLE software unfairly disadvantages smaller solo farmers as it takes longer to locate/fix configurations than a large farmer/pool user, allowing you to spot many problems in advance of a solo farmer - so EFFECTIVELY offering an advantage to larger farmers or those using pools. I would not like to imagine how many broken systems are running blindly on showing all green with little or no chance of rewards
They don’t need to fix consensus - they need to fix the buggy software
Agreed, this is certainly an issue.
FI - I have been lucky enough to retain sync for the last week or two but 2 days ago the node crashed, corrupting the db. I ended up having to splash the db and wait for a resync but so far i haven’t been able to get past about block 200K
I mixture of problems - another hard crash, dangling nodes, sync up to between 100-200K then loses connectivity with the node requiring restart’s, reboot etc walls of connectivity errors. It has been 2 days since it was able to sync - and this was a setup that worked well for a week but before then the harvester kept stopping but the GUI was green
Done the usual, chiadog, router setup, checking logs files, version updates, custom alerting scripts etc - its just random sometimes - and so frustrating
If we knew the software was working we could settle back and wait for luck to pay off … but its not that easy - fiddling with consensus is the tail wagging the dog - its not the appropriate area to look at
I am totally on board with the general idea but as others have mentioned, I don’t think it can be implemented now. That ship has sailed.
I do think it would have helped. The large farms would have more administration and possibly costs involved if they included an IP check in addition to a size check. It would have made it more difficult/expensive for big operators to fool the system.
But I’m pretty sure it would take a hard fork at this point to implement.
The take away here is there were several things that could have been done before launch, like this, or having pools ready, etc to ensure small farmers got to participate, but the fact is the developers interests do not involve any concern for small farmer’s interests.
That may sound negative, but it’s just a fact based in their business decisions. So knowing this, you should make decisions that serve your own interests.
This breaks rule number one of blockchain. It should be trustless.
This is my issue with the prefarm. If their chia “business” is a strong business model, it should be profitable after they do the work (like real businesses). People invest, they build, they make money. That is how it is supposed to work. Not… they print money, the build stuff.
Yes, it would have made it more expensive. But they all would have done it regardless, because it would have been more profitable to fool the system than not.
This is an over-discussed subject, so I’ll attempt to keep this brief.
It’s simply not true that developers weren’t concerned for small farmers’ interests. Until January of this year, the block time was 5 minutes and the reward was 16 TXCH. This was changed to 18.75 seconds and 2 XCH for mainnet, exactly because of small farmers’ interests. With 4608 daily chances to win instead of the original 288, the Chia team figured that small farmers could get regular rewards without pools being needed for quite some long time. But then the netspace exploded and you know the rest…
Yes, this is always true (as long as it’s not illegal/unethical) and nobody is arguing otherwise.
Even if it were possible to implement a penalty system like the one proposed here I would be fundamentally opposed to it. There is no reason to deliberately make the system inherently unfair unless you can come up with one heck of a good justification. I have yet to see that justification here or anywhere else.
The only real advantage a “whale” has is fewer ups and downs, and that will available to us little guys via pooling. Unless they also have an advantage in $/TB, they will have the same ROI as everyone else. If a small farmer in a pool isn’t profitable, neither are they.