THE CHIA FARM

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

ArthurA

Member
Sep 26, 2018
67
68
18
A friend of mine here started a week ago and had yesterday 171 plots and already owns 2 coins ...
The impression I've gotten is to think of a plot as a lottery ticket, the odds of a plot winning are determined by the number of plots globally in network and the more plots/tickets you have the better your chance of one hitting but increasing the number of plots you have doesn't impact the odds on a per plot basis.
 

Bradford

Active Member
May 27, 2016
223
50
28
The following is a 7401P with 2 x 4TB 4510's.



  • If I had to do it over again I would have gotten 4x 2 TB instead of the 2x 4TB 4510's,
  • I think I can squeeze out more plots/day by increasing parallel plots and playing with stagger times.
  • Too many in parallel and avg plot time will shoot up to over 12-14 hours per plot even with enterprise NVME.
What is this software?
 

Bradford

Active Member
May 27, 2016
223
50
28
Swar plot manager.
I'm currently using a bash script and tmux to plot on 9 drives simultaneously. Do you like using swar plot manager? Do you find that it optimizes your hardware/plots faster?
 

Bert

Well-Known Member
Mar 31, 2018
845
399
63
45
I recommend everyone doing this at scale to use plotman. It works really good and it staggers perfectly to ensure the best usage of your temp drives. I am amazed how much I can squeeze with plotman.


In theory, I must be making so much money, although I have been doing this for a while and spending 1.5KW electricity, so far I got 0 chia. I have ~800 plots and lost ~150 plots on the way due to bad drives, imagine the cost of 1.3PB of writes.

It took me weeks to figure out the tooling and how it works but even though my winning time is less than 3 weeks, I got none so I am in thousands of dollar loss and I probably found the most efficient way to plot and never wasted time on expensive high end computers/nvmes etc.

With network growing crazily, the chance to win is temporary so if you are not lucky, you may get none and stay in loss.

I am now going to sell my plotting gear to recuperate some of cost. On the bright side, the first thing I did when I heard this buying STX/WD stock. Hopefully I will recuperate some from there but it looks wall street sharks already bumped their stock price since April 15.

There is talk of pooling can help with RNG. Perhaps someone from STH community has time to build a pool for us, a trustable solution. Chia mining at its core aligned with home server so I cannot imagine a better platform.

Pooling will create the next big explosion on network growth as some people are/were waiting for the pool since plotting costly. I am hoping to convert my plots to pools as soon as it happens, so I hope to be ready when the pooling opens up.

Btw, for years enterprise hardware will not be cheap again. There goes our fun.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: vv111y and T_Minus

Bert

Well-Known Member
Mar 31, 2018
845
399
63
45
I left the office for the night I will figure it out in the morning. I have a bunch of remote harvesters so i need to login to each one but I think at this point I have like 300TB+ at least.
what kind of hard drives do you use for plotting? Are you running the rig at the office?

Your average to win must be around 5 days, did you win lots of coins?
 

rootpeer

Member
Oct 19, 2019
73
13
8
It is too late to get into solo farming now, one could argue that it is foolish to solo mine right now even with hundreds of TB of already plotted storage.

The showstopper for me is that if two or more competing plots are found, the farmer with the most plots gets the reward instead of it being randomly allocated. There is no point going against 3EB+ of unofficial Chinese pool plots.


Also, joining a pool when they eventually become a thing will require replotting.

I am definitely holding off for now.
 
Last edited:

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
6,634
1,767
113
The showstopper for me is that if two or more competing plots are found, the farmer with the most plots gets the reward instead of it being randomly allocated. There is no point going against 3EB+ of unofficial Chinese pool plots.
You sure of that?
I think they said "the best" plot wins (by whatever criteria they determine that).

The thing where the most plots win is overall since you basically have the most "lottery tickets"..

Whether it is still worth starting is a matter of personal taste - I certainly would not spend thousands of bucks now unless you want to plot/farm for a while, but if you have a few plot boxes and some drives, why not - even a single plot can win the lottery (o/c chances are low, but not impossible).
 

rootpeer

Member
Oct 19, 2019
73
13
8
You sure of that?
I think they said "the best" plot wins (by whatever criteria they determine that).

The thing where the most plots win is overall since you basically have the most "lottery tickets"..

Whether it is still worth starting is a matter of personal taste - I certainly would not spend thousands of bucks now unless you want to plot/farm for a while, but if you have a few plot boxes and some drives, why not - even a single plot can win the lottery (o/c chances are low, but not impossible).
That is the consensus here: The difficulty has become so high that it no longer makes sense to farm this crypt. · Issue #3509 · Chia-Network/chia-blockchain although I couldn't find it in the Chia documentation in my very limited search.
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
6,634
1,767
113
That is the consensus here: The difficulty has become so high that it no longer makes sense to farm this crypt. · Issue #3509 · Chia-Network/chia-blockchain although I couldn't find it in the Chia documentation in my very limited search.
I think the often quoted part of the documentation
" 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 - even with the plot filter in place. "
is mis-interpreted.

The plot filter removes 511/512 plots; so with a netspace of (@ now) 6.761 EiB there are some 70 mil plots out there, of these 511/512th are discarded leaving 137.000 eligible for the win of a single Coin.

If the consensus were correct then of all ppl with an eligible plot the one with the biggest total pool size would win then basically every single coin, because he is almost sure to have at least 1 eligible plot all the time and then he wins because he is the biggest.

But that is not the case - sure, the top dog currently wins 35% of all coins, but not 100% which he would (i think) if biggest pool wins.

Instead (the documentation also says) "the 'best' proof of space wins", defined by unknown criteria but apparently this can also be the plot of a smaller miner, even with just a few or a single plot.
 
Last edited:

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
423
148
43
36
Right, it's like the chance of winning the lottery depends on total lottery tickets you buy, that doesn't mean whoever spend $10k on lottery tickets will win it.

But I love to see people spreading fake information -- more chance for me to win ;)
 

rootpeer

Member
Oct 19, 2019
73
13
8
Yeah, it seems like the consensus on that github issue is wrong.

Reddit on the other hand claims that there can be multiple winners if their plots pass: https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/mq8p1d/_/gufwcvy
There is no info about this on the Chia documentation that I could find, other than:

The farmer computes the required iterations for each proof of space. If the required iterations < sp interval iterations, the proof of space is eligible for inclusion into the blockchain, so the farmer fetches the entire proof of space from disk (which takes longer than only fetching the quality), creates an unfinished sub block, and broadcasts it to the network. Note that the vast majority of required iterations will be way too high, since on average 32 will qualify for the whole network for each sub slot. This is a random process so it's possible for a large number of proofs to qualify, but very unlikely.
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
6,634
1,767
113
That should be easily verifyable by looking at the handed out coins divided by cycles (6/minute) since mainnet go live...

if >2 then true, if >>2 then happens way more often than anticipated...
 

gb00s

Well-Known Member
Jul 25, 2018
1,191
602
113
Poland
That the protocol rules are not as clear as they should be is worrisome. If assumptions are true that the 'size' of the farm decides at race-collision, then this gets very unattractive due to protocol design. Big farms would finance themself and small farmers' fields are just drying out. But, no documentation, no certanty. Always curious if someone doesn't provide proper documentation.

Btw. Passed 800 plots and still 0 coins. Running out of space ~1000. So slaughtering some cows in the future or .... idk. Whoever I talk to is unlucky for 2 weeks now. Big rise of the network has it's impact.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Marsh

rootpeer

Member
Oct 19, 2019
73
13
8
I just took some time to read up on Chia in general. That massive premine is crazy, surely an instant turn-off for me.
 

gb00s

Well-Known Member
Jul 25, 2018
1,191
602
113
Poland
Further to my experience (problems) space-wise. The GUI itself must have a very negative impact on the size of the temporary plots. I set up 2 absolutely identical test machines. Same CPU's, same RAM, 2x 756GB ioDrive2 drives in Raid0, target storage a 1.92TB Intel SSD. With farming in Linux (Ubuntu Server 20.04) in CLI, I always can have 8 plots running in parallel with a specific setup. On the system plotting with GUI, I can be happy to get 6 parallel plots running. Otherwise, the md0 drive hits it's space limits quickly. I also note, in CLI mode, the max size of a temporary plot file, doesn't exceed 239GB. Temporary plot files generated on the system running the GUI, always hit 256GB.

Also, the same setup plotting through CLI only, generates a plot in 8 hours (2x E5 2630v3 with 2x ioDrives in Raid0). With the correct sequence and after a 12hour warm-up phase, I'm able to plot 24 plots every day (1 plot per hour). So with 3 machines, I'm able to generate 72 plots a day. Not much but .... Running the same plotting sequence with the GUI, leaves me with 12 hours per plot or 50% more. Of course, I exchanged hardware. Still the same.

So the (buggy) GUI adds to some curious 'ideas' ...
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
6,634
1,767
113
Whoever I talk to is unlucky for 2 weeks now. Big rise of the network has it's impact.
Not me.

But interesting to see that the Gui has such a big impact after all... maybe I really should move to a linux system for my rigs...