I believe that the price of Chia will remain low as long selling pressure remains high. Farmers trying to get some ROI and Pools are the main contributors to selling pressure.
Many think and talk about short time frames. I try to think on a 3-5 year and onward timescale.
If more, many, most filled their available space with plots, solo farmed and HODL’d then selling pressure would go down. Combine this with time for Chia’s largest strength, its low power consumption, to hopefully increase Chia’s relative crypto value and USD value.
Receiving small cash now from pooling or selling seems a bad option to me, compared to HODLing and maybe ending up being a substantial benefactor from your/my early effort and patience.
The more that think like I, the better chance my hopes will come true.
I agree, except hoping it will go up between 1-2 years. I argued a guy the other day that I don’t mind it being around $200 now, for purposes of collecting Chia. If prices were skyrocketed now, it would be impossible to collect now.
The way I look at it, if for some reason chia bottoms out at $0, I’ll mine a different hard drive crypto.
Pools are forced to sell most of the Chia they earn in order to compensate pool members. Pool farmers getting daily pennies from pools selling Chia to pay them has a LOT to do with it.
Pools are about small income now. I submit that it is better to solo farm and wait for some substantial benefits rather than watching my stream of pennies dwindle and suffer further from pool fees.
I think you are mixing up selling XCH for fiat and transferring XCH from one wallet to another. A pool transfers the farmed XCH to its pool members. This is wallet-to-wallet, not a sale. The only thing the pool could be selling is the ~1% they make in pool fees, but I would be surprised if pools sell a large portion of what they take in as fees. They are speculating on appreciation just as most farmers are. But even if they would all sell all their fees it is merely 1% of the farmed XCH which hardly can be the supply pressure you are talking about.
Pools require money to operate, pay salaries, hardware, and probably to pay off debt. Of course pools are turning their XCH into fiat. Follow hpool’s transactions and see for yourself. Many pool farmers take their earnings in fiat or exchange it into BTC, ether or whatever. All of these transactions require the selling of XCH.
Besides the percentage of pools XCH that must be sold there is a more important factor for me. If I am in for the long haul, why would I bother paying fees and accepting the other risks and costs of joining a pool?
Pools offer no benefits in the long term to any but maybe the smallest farmers. Why give a cut of your earnings to a broker you do not need. especially if you think that XCH will increase in value in the future? If you solo farm and HODL you are simply better off … unless Chia crashes … but I’m not betting that way.
Of course, in a downmarket many will sell no matter how they got their XCH, be it through farming, pool fees, or purchase. Why hold on to an asset that has steadily lost value in the recent past? One can likely repurchase it at a much lower price later. But nothing of this has anything to do with pools. If somebody wants to hold XCH and not sell it, it does not matter how it was acquired, through solo farming, pool farming, fees, purchase, gift, … whatever. Pools make a lot of sense not just for small farmers. They lower risk.
Here is one scenario. Say the total network space keeps rising. Depending on how quickly it rises and your luck you may never earn anything solo farming. Pool farming assures that you get pretty much the expected XCH minus a small fee. With solo farming you may never realize your expected return. That is why it lowers the risk. With solo farming you will see a large volatility and your true return may be higher or lower than your expected return. With pool farming it is very close to your expected return. That is why it lowers risk. You can be certain you get what you expected to get. Solo farming does not. The smaller your farmer the larger the volatility you will see.
It’s not just a few dollars now though, it’s a few dollars worth of XCH today, and a few dollars worth tomorrow, and a few dollars worth the day after that, and the day after that, and in a few weeks it’s as much XCH as you would have earned on average solo farming, without having to worry so much about uptime, without having to have a farm so big that your probability of winning makes keeping it online worthwhile. I don’t really need to trust the pool I’m in much, they pay me out multiple times a day. I’m hodling for now, as I was solo.
Farmers selling to fiat is no different with solo and pooling IMO, some farmers are going to want to recoup their investments. There was at least one advertisement for a pool that was going to pay out in fiat, but AFAIK that never went ahead (it would have had a huge regulatory burden). The majority (if not all) of the pools pay out in XCH, which shouldn’t have a huge impact on price of XCH in fiat.
If you’re in it for the long haul you very likely will win your coins, but there was a roulette game once that hit red 32 times in a row - it’s entirely possible that you don’t win your coins within a reasonable amount of time; it’s a gamble.
A 1% fee to have a reliable XCH income is a very reasonable price to pay. I can do what I want with it when I have it, I can react to price changes hodl it/sell it, use it as collateral, etc, but I can’t do anything useful with a probability of having XCH eventually.
You are still mixing up farming and selling. One can pool and hold on to XCH just as one can solo farm and sell immediately when one wins a block. These are two entirely different things. Pooling dramatically lowers volatility and thus risk. It has nothing to do with if you sell now or hold on to XCH.
Your pool shill falls flat. Pools cause more fiat conversation by default and take a percentage from you doing it. Pools do not “dramatically lower volatility”.
I made my points about long term thought, solo farming mentality, and HODLing for the mid-term at least.
I am done struggling with your belief in pooling. The next argument will cost you $20.
Aspy, I agree with all your points. I have been farming solo XCH from EIB at 1. I won nothing. That is depressing, so now I average, .05 XCH every day and I’m HOLDL like you 3-5 years.
In the meantime, I bought 15 XCH coins cheaper than what my rig cost. LOL. Lots of stuff coming on the business side that will naturally push XCH up. Lastly, regardless of price, in 3 years CHIA knifes everything in half. If CHIA has a nice run, you are going to see a nice double in price. XCH all the way. Big believer, but I was just super bummed seeing 0 with a really nice rig and no errors. The XCH that you get today will go up and be worth it IMHO. I wish you luck in SOLO, but when you have over 200 TiB and get zip, you have to do something different.
The utter pointlessness of running a 58 TB rig for months and getting zero, is justified better to convert it into pool plots and earn 0.1/week (at current netspace) even if you don’t win any blocks.
I saw someone did the math (can’t back it up, it is somewhere in bowels of discord) that increasing your netspace scales better with pooling, because of 0.25 XCH reward no matter what. This becomes lucrative at sizes of 1PB+, though depends on pool fees and reward system.
I don’t see a connection between pool operators being forced to sell their commission XCH and putting downward pressure on the price. It should be negligible (and if it is not, then this crypto has no use case and doomed).
It’s not volatility that pools reduce, it’s your own variance. This is well established in other crypto, and is why pools exist. If XCH can’t maintain value in a landscape with pools, something else is wrong.
If you have enough space to win coins fast enough for you - don’t pool. For me though, fast enough is at least once a week, and I don’t fancy scaling up to 1PB. In my pool I’ll get 1XCH pretty much guaranteed every 2 weeks with 300TB.
You are missing one of the other advantages of pooling - confidence in the system, when I was solo I had as much monitoring as I could have, but until I won 2 XCH I had no idea if it was truly working. With a pool I can see very quickly if there is something wrong.
An important point to add is that while farming solo, you don’t really know 100% that your setup is working properly. While pooling, you know if it works or not as soon as you get your first payment from the pool (i.e. much quicker vs hitting a block on your own). We have seen several tragic cases of solo farmers not getting the expected rewards based on their space contribution to the chia network in this forum (me included). Are we unlucky or is something off with our setups? Who knows, maybe our coins are being farmed to someone elses wallet? With all software/code from third parties (as well as forks of chia), with unknown consequences, that have been used by farmers, there might by other “silent” issues with solo farming that is hard to diagnose at this point.
Aspy, one thing to keep in mind, this stall in the net space over the last two weeks could just be a grace period to allow everyone to get over to pools before it explodes again. Food for thought. If Netspace explodes as I believe it will, the SOLO farmer will have a much tougher time winning a block. The dollars a day I do get add up. Hate to see a fellow long-timer not get something for their hard work.
I’m not sure what “farmr” is, but I use the GUI, and only the slow, boring, official way plotting. I can see all, know all, and stay informed of all concerning my plots. Only 1300 plots, but I have received couple rewards almost like clockwork. I’m confident there are more on the way. I run a well regulated setup. Any time farming/plotting gets out of kilter, I fix it, and move on. IMHO, that solves the mystery of, "Am I ok doing this, are my plots any good, are they farming correctly? I am confident my solo operation, which is still slowly growing, will, over time, outpace any pool rewards, because there are no % skimmed by pool operators. Think financial advisor and their fees, vs solo investing. If you do it right, you can’t help to be ahead, and stay ahead.