First; If you are into Chia just for fun (as I am), then this question is not for you. For us the journey is the reward, and breaking plotting speed records is even more fun that overclocking and benchmark competitions.
No, this one is a question for those out there that are into Chia just for the money.
I see so many questions passing by (which as you know I often try to answer as well as I can) about which hardware to buy to speed up plotting. But …why?
At this point, wether you plot 50 a day or just 4, it will always be a net loss. And even if you are a Chia maximalist, there is still an important tradeoff to be made. Do you invest in temporary useful plotting speed (high thread CPUs, lotts of RAM and burning through expensive SSD’s) to fill those disks ASAP, or do you focus on capacity, accepting slower plot times but ultimately ending up with more plots farming for the same budget?
A few weeks ago that question was easy: plot like hell has no fury as you were up against the crest of that netspace growth, and a plot today was worth 5 tomorrow. But now we are so far beyond the profit horizon, that this really doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Yes, a plot today might make 0,00007 Chia today and 0,00004 tomorrow, but does that really still matter?
Maybe focusing on metrics like 3y cost per plot (and sorry y’all, but most of you are not going to be able to keep a plot farming for 10 years) will be way more important a factor in your eventual return than that bit of potential at the very start. Investing in more drives even if they are plotted more slowly might beat buying that 2TB NVMe SSD by a margin.
Yeah, the netspace growth has been crazy. Not sure how this will all play out.
But at least, unlike bitcoin – which I wrote off as dumb, and I still think it’s dumb, but it is clearly here to stay – I can say I was there! I don’t have FOMO. I was there from the beginning, for better or worse
I do think the last set of 18tb drives (I cancelled most of my orders) I will sell on eBay instead of plotting, though.
I’ve setup about 10 plots on my home PC, then decided to spend a bit on some secondhand servers and hard drives to see what I can do at a bigger scale. I won’t be trying to win a plotting race, because this will be better in pools so there is no point plotting hundreds of personal plots now only to overwrite them with pooled plots, which is handy as I don’t get most of the kit until next week.
I don’t expect to make much now, but maybe cover the cost of the kit, which I could sell if it goes nowhere (or if crypto gets banned etc) or use the space for some other distributed storage project.
Its a shame Chia plots aren’t useful stored data, but then bandwidth would be a commodity not just space.
For me, I am enjoying this Chia ride while it lasts. Not here for pure profits, partly as hobby.
I housed all HDDs within my existing PC cases I have (LL O11DXL (4 HDDs), LL PC A70 (up to 11 HDDs), CM Sniper (up to 8 HDDs) in various sizes. Some of these are for my NAS data backups, coupled with raid cards.
I expect to have 100 TiBs total for this Chia ride (as JBODs), some 40 TiBs used for my NAS backup with redundancy.
So basically I follow Bram’s ‘thinking’, just used your spare HDD spaces to farm.
If I get some Chias, I will be happy. If I don’t, the HDDs will be usable for other purposes. Part of my hobby’s budget.
Of course, I have to spend $$ on temp NVME drives to speed things up.
Will see how things go down the road, it is still just few months started.
Try to manage some expectations.
Well, I recently join Hpool and got $10 worth in my wallet… yay…
I’m surprised how many people are upset the Chia disk space isn’t being used for anything “productive”. I know that’s one key difference between other proof-of-space filecoin type cryptos and Chia.
The Chia files are nothing but random math.
One downside of allowing data in the blocks is you could end up hosting something dangerous you don’t want to host. But this is clearly an intentional choice with Chia… the creator of Chia was literally the same person who made BitTorrent, and that’s all about everyone sharing pieces of the same content!
I am not upset, it just seems interesting compared to something like filecoin where at least you are storing something, however the fairly modest bandwidth requirements for Chia are a huge plus, my planned setup I am hosting at some spare space at my work, and their internet is like 20 mbits down, 1mbit upstream ADSL. That wouldnt fly if I was doing anything “productive” with storage commercially. I am behind Bram and the idea Bittorent is something I have a lot of respect for.
As for me, I’m not racing netspace. There is some another reasons.
I’m investing some hardware I’ll be able to sell later. And they are not a lots of HDDs. ))
I’m learning. There are many things I learned about linux optimization, for example.
And it’s all for fun first!
May be I’ll be plotting for money at local to get some profit from my fun.
Yeah I’ve tuned down the plot processing. Once I start plotting for pools I’ll ramp it up to 100% as some pools have No fees for the first x time period. I figure if I can get as many pool plots going as possible in that time period I’ll avoid some fees.
But right now there’s no reason to burn up the higher output SSDs.
Yes, hou moved this forum.
Why you cancelled your drive orders?
On chiacalculator it seems that plotted drive will ROI after ~ 7 months - still a good investment in the real life world.
I would bear to disagree. I plotted for 10 days and made 2 XCH a few weeks ago. The odds get worse if you don’t keep up with the % growth of the netspace vs your own and of course nobody wants to earn 0 for 6 months but that’s the game you are in and you need to let go of the urge to win. I’m plotting my disks full and when I need a few hundred GB of storage I’ll just delete a few plots.
Honestly, the only thing that bugs me is that I’m destroying a couple of NVMe drives in the process but I had them before the prices went up and have broken even with my first 2 XCH.
Also, as I have a couple of machines at home that were largely idling, I’m enjoying them squeeze the max out of the CPU, RAM and NVMe drives.
Plus, the community is cool and Bram is a genius while Gene is a smart investor relations guy and JM is the master of the hard disk world, Justin is incredibly savvy and the whole team is simply fun to “hang out” with.
Will Bram and the guys cash in big time when they IPO? I sure hope so for them? They’ll probably hold a few thousand Chias themselves for rainy days but as you never know when the rigtht time to sell is, I guess the IPO would make sense to get them paid for the genius work they have done…
Mostly, I’m tired of plotting! I will finish the drives I have on hand, but I want to be done with the plotting phase and switch to pure farming for a while now…
I’m not sure what to say to this without sounding too negative. I love Chia for the really interesting technical challenges it brings in system optimization. I Mostly just run single plots on the background on my desktop to study the effects of different parameters etc. I like helping people with their more advanced setups and the hurdles they run into.
But.
The Chia team do not “hold a few coins”. They pre-mined 50% of all the Chia that will ever exist! So when people more frank than me, who I hope are wrong, say Chia is a scam coin, I have no real rebuttle.
Well they pre-mined 21 million Chia, but Chia is not finite like BTC, there will always be more Chia coming every day of farming so it’s not 50%.
But it will take 7 years at least for the farmed chia to reach that level.
You need to understand that the release rate is preplanned and published in the business whitepaper.
That 4000+ lottery drawings a day we have now, you know the ones that people complain about is so little you just have no chance of winning? Well. That will be going down to just 4. Yes, four.
I did not make up those numbers. They have been published.
After today’s interview with Bram Cohen on the prefarm, I am now convinced that if you are farming Chia for profit, you might as well fold now and cut your losses, but that deserves its own topic.
