I’m new to Chia and just had some questions come to mind:
With a massive growth in the netspace is it worth plotting / farming locally?
Would you even bother putting money into ‘mining’ if you are new to Chia?
Is it better to just buy/sell XCH on an exchange?
What do you get out of mining vs investing on an exchange?
I feel like the bubble has already passed for any newcomers in terms of mining.
What do you all think?
I personally do not further invest in Hardware. I share Brams view that he expressed on the Coindesk Podcast some weeks ago. This is the quote:
Today it might be profitable to purchase storage media in order to farm chia and get rewards for doing that. But I believe that longterm (might be like 6 months from now) this will be a VERY UNPROFITABLE thing to do. Because whats going to start happening, is that places that have huge amounts of storage, are going to start farming of that storage capacity and leveraging that already wasted ressources of which there is ludicrous amount of and thats where the eco-efficiency really comes in.
I believe we passed that tipping point already.
That’s what I am feeling as well, even as a n00b reading into this.
Over 6 hours my small 1TB test farm gained 5 years on its reward estimate 
Whilst I cannot answer whether it is worth investing or not at this point I can say, and I stand behind this 100%, that Bram stating that “places that have huge amounts of storage” are not going to start farming Chia on their spare capacity. He’s very, very wrong and I cannot even fathom why he would think that beyond using it as marketing or to fire up the investors.
There might be a few companies out there that do this. There might be quite a few more individuals with a NAS and spare capacity that do this. There might be a few individuals with an external drive or two, or space on their laptop to do this. I can say with some certainty that any company with a million dollars or more of investment in storage used for storing actual data are not going to suddenly decide to farm Chia. And even companies with only $10,000 of storage capacity are not going to suddenly start farming Chia.
Large non-tech related organization such as a bank or other business would see farming Chia as an operational security problem. And Excel has issues with numbers below a certain threshold it just annoys the accountants.
Large traditional tech organization such as PayPal (worked there), Facebook (worked for them) or Blizzard (worked there) or Google with more capacity than you can possibly imagine won’t be farming any significant amount of Chia because the amount earned would amount to a rounding error in their quarterly balance sheet. And it would be viewed as an operational security issue. You would get laughed out of the conference room for even suggesting such a thing.
Mid-sized tech companies of around 100+ people either have capacity but will view farming as not worth the effort to farm or they will be starved for capacity (this is usual) and won’t run the risk of running out of space.
Individuals with (true and actual) spare capacity on a NAS might do it if the software is smart enough to delete plots on an as-needed basis as the owner attempts to store actual data they care about and the software to earn Chia is stupid simple to install and run in the background without requiring any kind of fiddling around.
Individuals with spare external drives hooked up to their laptop that will eventually get bored of launching the software or running their laptop 24/7 and the only people who will do this long-term will be a 13-yr old kid because $2/day in extra income is a big deal wheras any functioning adult will be like “fuck that, life is too short.”
The rest of us who are in to crypto for the learning, lulz and lambos.
The only way any of this will change is if Chia is so stupidly remarkably successful that a single coin is worth a million dollars a piece.
There’s 4,608 chances per day to win coins. Let’s assume I have the capability to win every coin and nobody else even gets a chance. Let’s assume the coin is worth $1,000. I’m a big organization like Facebook. That’s $4,608,000 per day of income from Chia. That’s a rounding error.
There’s 4,608 chances per day to win coins. Let’s assume I have the capability to win every coin and nobody else even gets a chance. Let’s assume the coin is worth $10. I’m a mid-sized organization like that 100+ person start-up you’ve heard of. That’s $46,800 per day of income from Chia. That’s a rounding error.
We know we don’t have the capability to win every coin. We might, with 10PiB of storage (conservatively $500,000 worth of h/w investment, plus operational overhead), win eight coins per day at current netspace which, at any price below $1,000 per XCH, is not worth it.
So XCH is either worth $25 a coin, and you win eight a day with a half-million dollars of investment in which case, any sane and rational person earning a decent 1st world wage will ignore that opportunity or XCH is worth $1,000,000 a coin and that will increase netspace so any company that is capable of earning four coins per day would see $8,000,000 a day as a rounding error.
And it still all comes back to “it’s a very nice idea Mr mid-level engineer but the risk of getting hacked is too great and our customers won’t be very happy if we tell them we cannot store their data.” Bram’s math does not check out.
Edit: Fixed spelling errors and such.
Dude, thanks for taking the time…MY RESPECTS!
Nothing, absolutely nothing in their marketing shpeel checks out…compounding mountains of lie, the way I look at it… Heck BitTorrent data has utility, what utility does x million TBs of plot data serve other than support the “winners”? You know public phenomenon acts in waves, starts small, picks up pace, hits a peak, then, crash! What happens when 90% plots decide to go offline when some real hdd mining model appears on the horizon?
Well, there is already a real HDD mining with a purpose, it’s called filecoin, but there some huge stack is required so the people don’t rush to it, cos the risk is big - a lot of money blocked for 1.5 years.
I agree. I just don’t see anyone wanting to deviate from their core competency to farm Chia.
I’ve said in a few other threads that I think the real value in Chia is the technology that’s used to prove you’re farming idle space for a given amount of time. There’s a really neat property to it where it’s more economical for the “little guy” to farm idle space at near $0 incremental cost than for the “big guy” to set up / scale an industrial size farm.
Basically, you can never scale to the point where your per-plot cost of operating is cheaper than an average person, so I think there’s something of value in that. It’s something that’s cheap (or virtually free) for me when I’m farming 1-10 plots on my personal PC, but it has a real cost for someone doing it at scale.
I think it would have value as a reputation / anti-bot system, but I also think the blockchain is detrimental to implementing the kind of thing I’m imagining. On the Modern Finance podcast Bram said they were aiming for 20 transactions per second; more than Bitcoin, similar to Ethereum.
IMO having a slow, decentralized network where the value it brings (XCH) is treated as a (financial) security is a combination of things that essentially guarantee you won’t have wide adoption. However, I also think there’s probably some kind of system where it would be reasonable for most participants to have no expectation of return beyond a participation ribbon that says “I farmed 1000 plot hours into this pool / community” since that could lend credibility to their reputation in that pool / community (it demonstrates commitment / enthusiasm).
I think I’ve heard Bram say he doesn’t want XCH to be treated like a security, but the reality is that if my government (Canada) treats it like a security then it’s a security for me. I also think that if 20 TPS is correct, and you need a transaction to change pools, that will be a huge technical limitation on any kind of large scale adoption for scenarios that would require frequent pool switching and a large number of users. I’ve never really been into crypto, so maybe there are scaling solutions that I’m not aware of.
So I guess I’m not really a believer in crypto currency, except in developing countries with rampant financial corruption, but, out of all the ones I know about, Chia seems to have some unique characteristics that make it “cool” beyond being just another crypto currency. Whether or not that translates into XCH being worth a lot is anyone’s guess.
i think we passed it a week or more ago. around the 19th of May the network exploded and most of us smaller guys (i have 1500 + plots) just watched our times to win decline. It sucks because i have zero chia so far for all the work, and in the end might never get chia.
with the silly prices of hardware i’m sticking to what i got… if gpu mining is no longer profitable i’ll no longer bother keeping my pc’s running and only farm from my plex server and decide if it’s worth keeping plots or my erm family video’s 
(well he did start the bit torrent stuff)
There is another thing happening - the wild swings in the crypto market, it is making more sense to play the market with the cost of a single NVME than to burn it plotting for Chia fishing - your NVME is lost anyways, and if for example you short-sell ETH of BTC today for $150, then buy back on the dip and turn it over few times you will = 1xch much much sooner…this is what I would do - sell the setup - cost of rig+HDDs buy Gold, and hold - cost of NVME (already lost cause) play high risk trading on Crypto…mining has started to become, more and more, a fundamentally brainless exercise for the average person…
Never thought about it that way. But you got some valid points there. I work at an IT-Service Provider, and we would not use our scarce, spare storage for some cryptographic gibberish-bingo-thing. I strongly disagree about those 47k per day being a rounding error though for that company size. But thats another topic.
Rounding error or not, $48K a day in a 150+ person tech company doesn’t even cover payroll.
I look at it that way: That’d be around 1’440’000 per month. For doing nothing. You cover the payroll for about 96 employees (at avg. 15k total expenses per employee). And then way say we maybe assign 2-3 engineers for Chia farming (monitoring, expanding etc.) and the other 147 employees can still work for the clients.
The mistake you’re making is that you are assuming you are winning every single coin issued per day.
Or to put it another way, a single coin would have to be worth $50,000 and a guarantee win of one coin per day.
Good luck with that…
Totally agree. The whole calc is based on the assumption you laid out above if a mid-sized company wins every block. Anyway lets leave this track, it’s a dead end 
While I’m not sure I would agree that the bean counters would turn down a free $1.6B (in the Facebook example), I do agree that no sane company will take on the security risk. No one should expose the core of their business operation for a relatively small gain given the risk these days.
(The below uses very general guesstimates)
Assuming HDD’s depreciate 25% a year I’d assume Chia ROI’s will be around 20% ontop of that to cover power costs and the other equipment. So your return on your fixed investment should be 5% or higher a year.
This is what you should come to expect as more join Chia and is normal for investments. Too many are used to the 2021 ETH gpu mining rush and forget that ETH is also going 2.0 soon and that in 2020 ETH mining was a 8+ month payoff not a 3 month one. HDD’s also depreciate a lot slower than GPU’s.