The fundamental flaw in Chia?

I don’t normally do posts like this but am a little struggling for motivation so hope someone has some inputs which put me back on track, haha.

So I invested a little in hardware and am happily plotting away, with now 200 plots and a target of 500… My issue is I did some very simple excel calculations taking network growth, decreased daily revenues on pool farming (HPOOL) my growth potential and the cost of hardware into consideration there is no actually possile way for me to make money…

What is cristalizing now is that it is probably impossible for any average Joe to make consistent earnings even in a pool. 500 plots would have got me 2000usd chia 7 days ago, now they would get me 1200, by the time i reach 500 they will probably get me 500.

The network needs to max out/slow expansion (which i dont see happening for months) for us to have a chance as home farmers to make any significant amount of coin.

I believe there are enough HDD’s in the world, counting all the old ones being reused and the insane plotting power in china to make chia totally unviable and thus probably sadly at some point worthless.

I would love for someone to tell me I am an idiot and missing something?!?

Oh, and no I didnt get into Chia expecting a quick buck, my asics are getting old and I needed a new hobby, though it better to invest into this thatsome GPU’s… Lets see that pans out, haha

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I think the usual response to this is “but, pooling is coming…?”

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I still have soome hopes for pooling and not giving up yet, but considirng how fast potential earnings are decreasing on HPOOL I would really be interested ot know how they are going to solve that (Chia going to 50K would of course help lol)

pools will not fix problem of fast growing, i think then it will grow more faster, and will be not profitable at all for small farmers, as income decreasing will be more faster. it realy may start be profitable if price go to 10k for this i think chia need to go to binance

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Pooling will not increase your rewards to make you ROI. In the long run pooling will even reduce your revenue due to pooling fees.

The fundamental problem is that Chia was way too successful, and thus rewards have been diluted to far below production cost. The dev team in their wildest estimates projected a network size of 2 EiB by the end of 2021.

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Every independent farmer is right there with you - it’s that same philosophy of ‘mom & pop shop’ vs corporate giants…

Do it for the sake of hobby - great!
Do it for the sake of recycling hardware - great!
Do it because it is green? - Meh!
But do it because we’re still in a ‘fog of war’ phase, the picture becomes clearer in future…
eventualities we re insuring against: outlawing of crypto in many nations around the world, inaccessibility of hardware(nvme shortage), the company making it far far more difficult to plot in the future, there may be other unknowns…

So many of us are just sort of whacking away blindfolded, but there might not be a piñata to begin with…(isn’t that the nature of crypto industry on the whole?)

On the ROI: practically the valuation model of XCH seems to be derived from a shortage of semi-conductors - now being the peak-time of shortage with future looking to normalise the supply chain, I think we have already seen a YTD high value for the XCH and can easily project it to become normalised in single digit figure, but not more than double… If this is true the ROI is declining almost infinitely…so payout expectation? Next time they make the big run on the semiconductors (in about a 10 year time-period frame). Assuming you have successfully struck gold enough number of times that is.
If this follows through, you can definitely expect a reduction in netspace making the investment only long term viable (given there is no complete ban and abandonment of the crypto universe). I am going with bet what you can afford to loose philosophy, have yet to see my electricity bill…

Sorry, but I think this going to off hands of devs. the exponencial growth is far to stop for keep “normal” farmers to work… I thinks Chia was be the future “Bitcoin hash” —> imposible to farm if you not are a BIG farm.

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It’s not a flaw. It’s not a problem.

At one point ETH wasn’t worth the electricity it cost to mine it.

“Obstacles protect opportunities.”

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Hey Koala, thanks. You are right, it should just be about getting some coins in the wallet for now. It’s always a gamble .

Who knows what the future will hold :slight_smile:

You’re either missing the greater scheme of resource consensus or you doubt your understanding of it. Every currencies that uses resources to build consensus has this paradigm of most-efficient-resource-consumption wins. People who thinks Chia is flawed or is not working the way it’s supposed to are either new-comers who don’t know the technicals behind crypto or are just tricked by the marketing. Whatever resource used to earn rewards, people are going to be attracted to, so much so that competition between producers(miners/farmers, whatever they name those people) are going to converge so that only those who have a reasonable amount of edge will dominate(or if they think it’s profitable in the long run). This applies to almost every coin(even PoS to some extend), and Chia very much fits the mold of this pattern just with a bit of technical subtleties.

To me the fundamental flaw with Chia is not storing anything for people with at least half the space being used.

People can, do, and will pay for storage if done right. See new players like Wasabi, or old different systems like Usenet (which true, is less decentralized than it used to be).

So far the decentralized storage players haven’t hit on how, but one of the interesting things with Chia is seeing that with the right incentives, people will stand up large infra and if it’s proximal to good connectivity, lots of interesting actual storage-related things could be unlocked…

And in the meantime you still have the possibility for XCH appreciation; are out power, time value of money, and depreciation; but also still have the hardware (other than potentially burned out SSDs).

Oh and fun if you like storage and crypto and not being bored, which it sounds like you don’t like!

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