I don’t know if my question is silly, but why can’t chia be one big pool and simply be rewarded by the total size of plots vs the total net space? One official pool and nothing else… 
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It could potentially go that way if everyone joins the same pool.
Until HPOOL started winning so often nobody seemed concerned with pools. Now everybody wants to be in a pool.
When every newcomer to Chia uses a pool from the start, it is only a matter of time until all solo farmers give up and join a pool.
So, you have a valid question, why not just automatically stick us all in the same pool as ultimately solo farming will not make sense for anyone.
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Because of it were that way, many people would simply stop at a max capacity of hdd volunteering. With the way it’s setup, it’s causing a mad gold rush on the HDD…fueling shortage, building value, sort of like creating artificial shortage and leveraging value on a global scale… It’s beautiful really…
Companies can’t get access to raw materials because of shipping crisis, so upstream delivery of components like semiconductors is facing delays, companies can’t keep up with rising demand so the market price is driven up on the production equipment, and with the growth of netspace we have seen millions of TBs have come online hence removed from supply chain leading to shortage and they use this “scarcity” factor to establish value of Chia. But to be able to pull off a global race, simply by releasing a software and making people think they will “win” fairy-dust is just beautiful, absolutely gorgeous…
It realy does not matter. From the Chia central pov the whole network is always just one pool. From the individual farmer pov, it’s always your stake of the totality of the net-space.
All a ‘pool’ does is reducing variance in the XCH/time for its participants, at the cost of a pool tax.
Crypto mining is always a race to the bottom as a result of an organized decline of the commons. If everyone on the network agreed to just farm one single plot, the Chia flowing onto the network would still be the same, and farming would actually be profitable for all and the currency would truly be ‘green’.
This will never happen because from a systemic pov this is an ‘unstable equilibrium’. Anyone breaking the agreement and mining 2 plots instead woud double their income as long as no one else would follow. Ofc, if everyone started farming 2 plots we’d just be back at the previous reward distribution, but with everyone now at double the production cost.
Form a game theoretic perspective this is a guaranteed race to the bottom. Bitcoin would also be ‘green’ if all miners agreed to not race each-other. The Chia team might have underestimated the rate at which this race would unfold, but not the inherent dynamic.
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I keep bringing this up from Chia gitfub FAQs :
“For reasons that aren’t super simple to intuit, the only thing each plot is competing on is to have the best proof of space and thus the chances of getting a reward depend on total size of plots on the farm”
Dude, to me this reads they always wanted there to be a race…nobody addresses this…
This reads more number of plots = winner by default in a plot filter…meaning, get more and more plots, hence more harddrive = cause HDD rush… Why is nobody clarifying this for me, what am I reading wrong here?
And what’s happening is people with 100s of TBs are reading multiple filter passes daily with eligible plots, yet failing to compete, and probably because the winners have out plotted them…so basically there will always be a supporting network of losers to prop up the entire network so that the few with massive storages can win it all… How is this decentralised…how is any of their marketing gimmick 1% accurate?
I think it could be implemented that way too.
- It would eliminate the need and purpose of all pools
- It would solve the “evil” HPool issue
- It would be immediately apparent to anyone if their system isn’t setup properly
It wouldn’t help with human greed though. So I’m not sure if the gold rush would be any different.
Also probably that would introduce other problems, namely how do you verify your total net space? You can’t simply get size of a plot directory otherwise people could produce random junk to pass as plots.
They need to be valid plots. Then how do you verify they are unique plots? Otherwise people can duplicate the files and just rename them. So you to confirm the size of total unique “stuff” (whatever cryptographic junk is stored in those files)
Then how do you verify the content is unique across accounts? You can copy the same plots to multiple machines and have them verified in different accounts.
Anyway, maybe it’s technically doable but I doubt it would be a trivial task.
AFAIK the official Chia pools will not be like traditional mining pools. They will just be an identifier, nothing more. All the pooling logic and distribution will still happen by the network. No expertise required, just marketing.
Given that it’s the farmers who build the blocks it’s not as bad as bitcoin (or hpool), where a pool can pick which transactions to include because they build the blocks for you. But it would still be a bit too much centralisation, and pretty risky for that unique pool which would have a hot wallet with millions of dollars in it all the time (unless they choose to send dust 100 times a day…). There would also be scaling issues for that pool, which the chia developers don’t want to deal with. The current approach is outsourcing all these issues to a myriad of pools, in effect diluting the scaling and security issues (and the pools take a small fee for that)
Technically, it’s a good question, there’s no reason not to do it.
Financially, the top X% of people that were put into the pool would consume so much of the rewarded Chia, that as you got down to the bottom 50%, you could no longer sub-divide the XCH and those bottom folks simply wouldn’t get any choice.
I think Cardano handled this really well but slowly lowering the cap that can be staked in Stake Pools, forcing more stake pools to be created and spreading the distribution of stakers out to a wider footprint of pools.
Otherwise you’d have every that got into Cardano/ADA early DOMINATING the 1 Stake Pool and if the rewards were computationally less than 1 Lovelace (the smallest unit), those folks just wouldn’t get any return.
At least now if they join a stake pool that isn’t too full, they will partake in some of the rewards.
Diversification creates redundancy. I think the biggest any pool should be is 20-30% and hope that there are at least 4 large pools.
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Chia can be split down to a trillionth of a coin. The income per plot will drop below the cost of keeping the lights on long before we have a netspace with 1 trillion plots (over 94,000 EiB).
How exactly do pools create diversification or redundancy? (Spoiler: They don’t)
Spacemesh does that, one big pool at the protocol level.
Everyone participating in the network gets paid (proportionally) for each block created.
The future will tell wich approach is better.
One goes down, one stays up > One goes down.
Economic, scientific and technological progress come from people who have to feed their egos. Either by money, status or just showing everyone else that he/she has the longest dick. Pools are basically socialism. The netspace is growing like crazy because people with superior knowledge can make more money than the calculator would make you think. This is in the interest of the Chia Founders because they want to get big for their IPO. You see who egos determine the success of the project?
If just some people come together for fun, nothing gets done.
How exactly do pools create diversification or redundancy? (Spoiler: They don’t)
One goes down, one stays up > One goes down.
That doesn’t apply for multiple reasons. The Chia blockchain is no more or less stable, diverse, or redundant now that pools have been introduced. Whether a pool goes down has zero impact on the blockchain. Also, if the pool I’m participating in goes down temporarily, the fact that there are other pools still up and running does me no good whatsoever. No individual farmer benefits from the so-called redundancy of having multiple pools.
If, on the other hand, every plot was automatically part of a single pool, one integral to chia itself, then the only way the pool goes down is if chia as a whole goes down.
Having multiple pools results in no resilience improvement at all.
Not exactly true I believe as Hpool runs a remote node for its new client that allows farmers to skip syncing.