@Fuzeguy, all I can say is wait until you are at 500%* expected time to win (almost a year with the current network space and your amount of plots) - then you will probably not be so sure that your setup is working properly. Just saying.
I have nothing to back this up⌠BUTâŚmy opinion is that in a quest to produce huge farms quickly, many are relying on questionable or at best unproven and untrustworthy techniques. This is a big risk factor for success and for getting legitimate rewards. What if they make plots that are not actually able to win anything - ever? What if these fun tools are stealing your wins? How would you ever know? Sometimes maybe youâre sure, or think so, but this is bizzaro world, people are not always straight. Where there is a profit potential, there are scammers aplenty, and good ones.
Regardless of anything being on the up-and-up or not, do the math, (legitimate) skimming by pools lower your percentages, there is no getting around that over time.
Indeed, you are correct in what you are saying, but one streak of unluck might play with you confidence in ways that you are currently not aware of. You can also do the math and see that if you are in an unlucky streak, then you might wait for a very very long time before you see that next reward. When that happens you might better get what Iâm talking about here.
PS. I had the same attitude as you have now when rewards were coming in as expected/faster.
I have about 900 plots so far of which 500 are OG still and I am now filling empty space with poolable plots. I have around 350-400 plots in a pool. I have been earning consistently, not large amounts but every day I get a little more XCH. I will overwrite my OG plots and have the whole lot probably around 1200 plots or so when done all poolable.
If I want to step away from pools, I will just press a button and self pool. If my 1200 plots earns me a block then thatâs great, if not it will earn me small amounts of XCH every day placed back in a pool, its my resource to do with as I wish. I cannot see that it really makes any great difference, its a few percentage points either way. OG plots have much less versatility, and since we might all have to replot to k33 at some point, the idea of replotting is something that we will all have to accept will happen from time to time. Will anyone plot OG K33 when K32 is phased out? No. Why would you? Sure legitimate pools skim a fee but itâs minuscule.
As for whether we should sell our Chia now, no I think not. Will Chia be profitable in the long run, is anyoneâs guess, but promote it enough and support the project and the odds are slightly higher that the Chia price will rise. All I really care about is did I cover the electricity when I finally cash in my Chia, since my servers and drives are all secondhand and I sought out good deals on the kit and so they will be worth what I paid for them when they need to go. I am hoping I can repurpose them to some other sort of paid storage/cloud processing etc but I will sell them if they have no function.
Does it matter if pools sell their XCH to pay their running costs now? Is this driving the price down? No, the current global uncertainty in crypto is over regulation. The party isnât necessarily over, but the cops have said to turn the music down or it will be. Like it or not, it does not seem as though the world is ready to tell fiat currency to take a hike and start running everything in BTC. Governments are still calling the shots and for now, they are going to try to keep it that way.
I am still farming though, as I enjoy it. Will it earn me a lot of money - I hope soâŚ
Well, at the end of the day, itâs all a crap shoot, truly. It certainly feels good to get a little reward always, as in a pool. Iâd think of that like a slot machine, they keep giving back a little, to keep you on the hook. In the end, of course the house always wins something. But you feel good whilst you are there.
Solo, itâs a lottery ticket. You buy it, and mostly you lose. But every now and again⌠Woohoo, a payday arrives and you break out the bubbly!
Iâm guessing we are all in it, at least in part, for the fun and excitement, plus the camaraderie. With a sharing of group experiences, there is a bit of kumbaya which is definitely worth the time and expense, regardless of how any of us get rewarded in XCH. Chia to one and all!!!
Interesting observation in spacepool discord: a guy claims that spacepool reported that he hit a block while chia gui do not show any 0.25 block reward for his wallet (see pics below). Additionally, another guy claimed that he had the same experience. The first guy claims that his farming rewards address I correctly stated in the gui/his config. I would guess that either spacepool wrongly reported a block reward for his account or what you wrote above might actually be true. Horrific if this is true when thinking how many farmers have played with third party software/code (read: madmax, chia clones, plot managers etc.).
A better analogy would be, choose from either:
I would say one of those is more of a crap shoot than the other.
I would also add (in the second bullet) the possibility of your coworkers steeling your salary behind your back with you having very low chance of proving that the crime is happening. That would be the real crap shot in my opinion.
One thing I did semi-deliberately miss from my bullet points is how many times the coin gets flipped - if you were offered those options and the coin was flipped once a month, it would be an awful proposition over a humanâs working lifetime, but if the coin was flipped every day, or every hour, or every second, the second option becomes a better one, since itâs possible for the coin to land on edge (albeit unlikely), it does get better and better to take the second option the more coin flips (opportunities) you get.
So, to relate XCH farming to coin flips, from the calculator for todayâs netspace, you get a coin flip per month per ~162TiB, since that gives you around 50% probability of winning in a month. If you have many plots then you get enough coin flips to be able to ride out more tails in a row than someone with less plots (of course), thus by having more plots you smooth out the impact of unluckiness over any given period of time; in an idealised pool you are just averaging statistical variance with everyone else, and ideally a pool is not some conspiracy to defraud farmers.
Itâs important to be able to acknowledge how big of a fish you are - in ETH/BTC etc itâs painfully obvious how small a fish any normal person is, in XCH it is less obvious, but different advice is relevant to different people, and there is no reason to disparage people who are more or less comfortable with risk.
It is ultimately on the Chia team and the wider ecosystem to make XCH worth something, if farmers are selling it off ASAP however they get hold of it then thatâs a wider, and hopefully temporary, issue.
farmr is a nice little interface that allow to to know exactly how productive your farming is and gives you a bunch of other interesting statistics.
Hi all,
sorry for jumping in late. I kinda like @Aspy68 reasoning as it matches what I think. One thing that came to my mind while reading through the thread: wasnât this same situation true with other coins? I mean, as far as I know (note: Iâm quite new, so this doesnât mean much), many coins use Pools and yet it still works.
Cheers!
wasnât this same situation true with other coins?
Yes, itâs exactly the same, the vast majority of miners of other coins use pools, because the benefits are obvious.
One of the pool operators put a post here recently arguing the opposite position - that the price of XCH will only rise if everyone goes to NFT plots - I disagree with that position too, both positions are overly simplistic analyses of something more complex, and are just different ways to blame farmers for prices.
For solo and for pooling the major difference between bitcoin and Chia is value/difficulty.
If I had invested my $5000 in a BTC miner my chances of winning would be so small that waiting for the big payout would make little sense. It would take years. Pooling would make sense for my $5k BTC mining investment. I would not solo mine BTC unless I could invest a whole lot more cash.
A $5k investment in farming XCH has you waiting months for a win, not years. There is no need to join a pool.
If you just spit out a few plots and are no longer plotting then your win chance is so low that you might as well join a pool. If you have enough plots to win in 6 months or less then I recommend going it on your own.
I pointed out pooling as one of the selling pressures, not the only one. The main point of my post was that receiving small payout now from pooling or selling seems a bad option to me, compared to solo HODLing and maybe ending up being a substantial benefactor from your/my early effort and patience.
Each must figure out what is best for them based on their farm.
My farm has 42 of 72 TiB filled with K33s. I continue to pump out 4 K33s every 24 hours. If Chia does not crash, I will be adding (as needed) another 6 8TB drives to my present 10. If Chiaâs value justifies it, I will continue to add HDDs above my present plans for 116.4TiB (128TB).
I am currently on track to win 2 XCH every 6 months. If your chance of a win is over six months to a year then you are probably better off pooling, especially if you are no longer plotting. If you have a setup like mine or better, then I do not see pooling as being necessary or beneficial.
Be well!
As long as youâre fine with flipping a coin every 6 months - heads you win 2XCH, tails you win nothing, then thatâs fine, and all the best with it.
In 5 years you will get 10 coin flips, they are all independent events with 50% probability each, flipping 5 tails doesnât make the next flip more likely to be heads.
Are you creating new non-NFT plots? I can understand not wanting to replot - but NFT plots have the potential to pool in the future if you change your mind. I have about 4x your space and was undecided about replotting, but the drop in price actually makes me keen to get more XCH ASAP rather than wait around for the netspace to possibly shoot up again.
Flip your coin ten times and record the result. 80% of the times you do this routine you will get 4 heads. 25% of the time you will get 5 heads. It only takes ten flips to put you in the middle of the expected vs actual zone.
10 flips for me is 5 years or less and yes, I have the patience to wait for 10 flips.
If Chia is a fail between now and then, then I lose my bet and repurpose. If you were in a pool and HODLâd then you also lost your bet.
If Chia is a success then we both win, but I did not have to worry about the poolâs stability, security, or honesty, or about the percentage of my earnings they were taking.
Your point about NFT plots is well taken, as you point out, this gives one the ability to change your mind in the future.
I am still pumping out OG plots, but will switching to NFTs this week. I wanted to give a bit of time to make sure they were not a disaster, lol! NFT plots seem to be working well so it is good advice IMO to start plotting them. I may even re-plot my OGs later if conditions do not warrant further expansion. This works both ways. If I do not see sense in further expansion, then it is because the numbers are going in the wrong direction. If this is the case, I am more likely to look to pooling as an option, and will want those NFT plots.
For sure. I am currently plotting faster than the network and still have space to fill.
I will have filled the storage I have in 40 days. I will work all the numbers again at this point to determine my best course of action. If numbers are about the same or have gotten better, I will bet a bit more and buy up to six more 8TB HDDs as required and if given good ongoing numbers will continue expanding. If numbers have gotten worse at any time I can hold off on expansion and re-plot my OGs.
My hope and belief is that total network size will continue to grow, but probably at a rate slower than I am plotting. If Chia price goes up then there will be more incentive for faster network growth, but the increase in price also makes my percentage of the total more valuable. It is hard for the total network to grow with a low Chia price. This is about the only place where the probable numbers work in my favor, lol!
If Chia prices rise enough to cause the total network size to outpace me I would probably have enough incentive to double down and invest in a better plotter and expand even faster myself! 
As long as I keep my bets reasonable I will keep playing. The game is much more difficult than I originally expected but I am having even more fun as a result! Itâs like I ended up playing Bridge after thinking I was sitting down at a game of go fish or crazy 8s. Bridge is much more difficult but also much more mentally rewarding, lol!
With effort and luck, my Chia farm might even end up becoming a great investment!
Good luck to all!
