Chia Plotting Service in India

$0.36 to send ~$76 is an order of magnitude less than Paypal or even VISA
Bro with Nano, there is literally no fees - whether you want to transfer 1 Rupee or a million USD, as long as it's done in Nano it's instant and fireless.
At this point, you're going to need to do your own research instead of having someone else explain it.
Yea I agree, I think a bit of self research will help since I think rdst is stuck in the early 2010s public perception of crypto :/
And granted that that has not entirely changed, but it's no longer the actual case with crypto.
For me Blockchain != Cryptocurrencies and in all my posts I haven't alluded to that either. Maybe you are taking my stance on the usability of cryptocurrencies as same as that on blockchain but that is not what I am saying.
Also, I might have a bias, but I am not closed to changing my opinion if enough information is presented.
Agreed, but my point is that all cryptocurrencies are blockchain based or derivative, and hence cryptos are here to say. Sorry if it came off as blockchain = crypto.
 
At this point, you're going to need to do your own research instead of having someone else explain it. I'm trying to understand what it is that you don't understand and I feel like it's an entire ocean lost in a single drop. Transaction fees did spike a few weeks ago, but you don't actually have to pay the full amount if you're not in a rush for confirmation:

View attachment 106393

$0.36 to send ~$76 is an order of magnitude less than Paypal or even VISA.

Have you tried to send a SWIFT payment from India recently? There's exhaustive paperwork. The current goverment of India absolutely does not want you to send money abroad these days. It was easier to send crypto when we were purchasing raw materials from abroad. And what I said about other people in other countries, banking services are not easily available for the common person. But everyone has a mobile phone and everyone has an app for a crypto wallet.
But isn't the volatility of the currency an even bigger deterrent than having to deal with bank paperwork. Or do you instantly transfer the payments received into traditional currencies.
 
Also, I might have a bias, but I am not closed to changing my opinion if enough information is presented.
That's good to hear :) I don't know where exactly to point you at to get started on research for cryptocurrencies in general, I'd urge you to take a look at BAT (Basic Attention Token), Algorand, Cardano, Nano and Elrond for starters. Start by looking up what these projects are doing, and maybe that might help to give an idea of the potential of crypto :)
Or do you instantly transfer the payments received into traditional currencies.
Yep, this is what is done currently by many people. Either this, or they have a crypto linked payment card, much like a debit or credit card.
 
But isn't the volatility of the currency an even bigger deterrent than having to deal with bank paperwork. Or do you instantly transfer the payments received into traditional currencies.

Yes, from a consumer point of view, you either convert your volatile crypto to a stablecoin like USDT or spend it or convert it to fiat. Don't hold. Holding crypto is where the risk is and the majority of people who make use of crypto as a currency, have no holdings. It's conversion to transaction and an empty wallet. You've probably only learned about crypto through the perspective of an investor with holdings, and this would perfectly explain your understanding of it. But regular people don't hold more than they can afford to lose. They basically live hand-to-mouth, but in a digital world. Most of the time, the crypto they earn is already spent before they even receive it (meaning, it has a place to go so there's no holding on to anything extra).

Ok, nothing to do with this OR you, but i'm extremely interested/concerned how sharing one's travel history can be a privacy risk. Please elaborate if you don't mind. No personal deets required. Thanks.

I've been online since the late 90's. There's a lot that I wish I could erase, but the internet remembers everything. In my experience, it's better not to share more than what's necessary, publicly.
 
At this point, you're going to need to do your own research instead of having someone else explain it. I'm trying to understand what it is that you don't understand and I feel like it's an entire ocean lost in a single drop. Transaction fees did spike a few weeks ago, but you don't actually have to pay the full amount if you're not in a rush for confirmation:

View attachment 106393

$0.36 to send ~$76 is an order of magnitude less than Paypal or even VISA.

Have you tried to send a SWIFT payment from India recently? There's exhaustive paperwork. The current goverment of India absolutely does not want you to send money abroad these days. It was easier to send crypto when we were purchasing raw materials from abroad. And what I said about other people in other countries, banking services are not easily available for the common person. But everyone has a mobile phone and everyone has an app for a crypto wallet.

The funny part is that many people dont know you need to spend to send coins. I had to explain the concept of markets and this to someone in my office who wanted to invest in someCOIN.

Sadly, I may have turned him off from crypto for life :p
 
I stand by my word that chia is stupid.

The reason I believe that crypto are stupid is because it believes in greater fool theory. but my personal conspiracy theory is that corrupt chinese/russians are using it as a way to get the money out of the country. probably corrupt indian politicians too. crypto is the new swiss bank.
That is why they will always do this drama but never ban it because it is easy to transfer money without being traced.
 
The current goverment of India absolutely does not want you to send money abroad these days.
Apologies for butting in, but can we extrapolate this further and see what's the endgame?
When crypto gain a significant share of transactions countries won't be able to regulate their own economy. Countries impose these restrictions to prevent capital flight. What happens to India when she loses control over her economy?

Will the US let go of its power to print reserve currency "petro dollar" to a random group of developers?
Will China cede control of its economy to outsiders?
Who will decide what is right and what is wrong? Democratically elected leaders or a random group of people?

I am not saying I know it, just asking to know how people think this will play out. Happy to be corrected.

$0.36 to send ~$76 is an order of magnitude less than Paypal or even VISA.
At what scale and how many transactions per second?
 
At what scale and how many transactions per second?

VISA currently does 1700 tps (and can peak at 20k tps) with a fee of about 2%+ and they've been around for 60+ years. Paypal does around 200 tps.

As pointed out by @TheCoolerPlayer, Nano currently peaks at 1000 tps (but has seen 7000+ in testing) with zero fees, and they've been around for 5 years. And that's just a single crypto. But Bitcoin does less than 10 tps.

But what does it matter? Comparing the numbers of a well established fiat banking system against the novel blockchain model introduced a decade ago is like blowing into the wind. There will be eventual improvements, evolution and iteration. Crypto is the future, and it's here, now. People who are speculative and questioning mirror the same mindset of those who opposed the motor car or airplane and preferred horse pulled carts instead for their transportation needs.

Democratically elected leaders

Digressing here, but this is a vestige of British rule. That is, looking up in awe towards leaders as if they're some kind of ultra-human and affording them respect beyond what we give each other. "Sir ji..." stuff. Leaders are servants of the people and should be viewed as such. Their position in a society is dictated by the people who entrust them with decision making. They're not magical creatures with superhuman abilities. There are us, but with responsibilities that are publicly accountable. Servants.

a random group of people?

Cryptocurrency is not under the control of any single person or group of people. People that seek to take control appear as that one cartoon character trying to catch a slippery fish and failing. Adoption of crypto in general will gravitate to the one that serves the will of the people, as pretentious as that sounds. We're still in the baby steps phase with new crypto (like Chia) being introduced and tested.

Apologies for butting in, but can we extrapolate this further and see what's the endgame?

I'm no crypto guru, I'm just here to help make Chia plots for those interested in being part of the blockchain and feel lucky enough to perhaps earn some in the next 5 - 10 years (the average time a Chia plot is expected to be remain viable).

But individual countries will depend on taxes, as they currently do. If one day, all financial transactions are digital and anonymous, then it's logical to assume that whatever you interact with in the real world, will be taxed. Your home, the street outside your front door, the food you buy, the clothes you wear, the places you visit for work and for leisure, for the vehicles you own and everything else. Your immediate local economy will be dependent on taxes. There will be state government taxes and central government taxes. Basically how things are right now, today.

Countries impose these restrictions to prevent capital flight.

If and when capital flight becomes a thing for a country to deal with, it's already too late. People leaving with their money cannot be convinced to stay, they've already decided that they're better off somewhere else and have lost faith in the country's economy.

Speaking specifically to the current government, there were no such restrictions on sending money abroad with the previous government. It's not unnatural to assume that when the current government falls out of favour, the new government would revert these changes as they are detrimental to India's participation in global economy.

From a consumer's perspective, there were such cool items in customs notified shops during the early to mid 2010's that are impossible to find these days, all we have are subpar 'Make In India' stuff that falls apart if we look at it wrong. 'Make In India' is a wonderful initiative but it should really be 'Make in India with bleeding edge technology and not a rusty transformer from 1981.'

@rsaeon I'm sorry for being part of the derailment of your thread. Then again I hope you appreciate the discussion.

It's certainly intellectually stimulating. And it helps pass the time while the plotters do their plotting.
 
Slightly OT but if anyone wants to support scientific research and earn crypto simultaneously, look at BOINC and GridCoin.


 
Speaking so much about HDD. Anyone know anyplace to buy like cheap large capacity drives? Buying a new one is really expensive these days and finding second hand at cheap prices is difficult. Any suggestions?
 
The cheapest way was to buy external drives and remove them from their enclosures, but this voids the warranty, which is kind of important for something that's destined to fail by it's nature (mechanical). But that's for the single, large drives. In light of shortages, it may be a better/smarter option to go with multiple smaller drives and use software to have them present as a single large volume.

I've been experimenting with MergerFS on OpenMediaVault to combine multiple drives into a single shared folder/volume over the network. It works well, but there is some cpu overhead. But it's non-destructive and you can still individually access each volume. You can also add or remove drives without losing files that are on the other drives. Transfer speeds appear to be the same as direct attached storage. That is, more than what a gigabit can offer but less than 2.5 gigabit (I have a 10 gigabit link between the network storage and windows pc).

Stablebit's Drivepool is a (paid) windows alternative that people say also works well if you'd rather not have a dedicated network storage but still want to combine multiple drives into a single volume.
 
I can understand if it's an emergency but multiple smaller drives instead of a single larger equivalent make zero sense considering space and more importantly power requirements. There's also a mathematical equation about failure probability with more drives but i won't get into it because i hate math lol. Look it up...
 
There's also a mathematical equation about failure probability with more drives but i won't get into it because i hate math lol. Look it up...
I don't think there's much math involved in this lol, just that the more drives you have, higher are the odds of one getting a faulty drive. More logic than math tbh
 
I've read about that math, basically it says the more drives you have, the more chances you have of a failure among them. If one out of ten drives fail, and you have ten drives, then the math says all ten can potentially fail. Because they may have all been the unlucky ones out of ten.

Which sounds horrible, until you think about it.

If you have a single large drive, and it fails, you've lost all your data unless you've had some redundancy somewhere. But if you have four smaller drives, and three fail, you still have one drive left of data.

In reality, it's more like one out of 50/100/200/300 depending which drive you select from Backblaze's failure reports: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2021/

And there's also the hypothesis that the manufacturing of lower density drives is far more robust and proven compared to high density drives simply because more of them have been made over the years and the designs have been iterated and improved upon whereas the larger capacity drives have been around for far less, and sell in much less volume, so there have been less opportunities for the manufacturer to improve upon them.

Power consumption for a smaller drive pool isn't an issue, a desktop drive shouldn't consume more than 10w, or about the same as two RGB fans.

multiple smaller drives instead of a single larger equivalent make zero sense

That's a blanket statement, and doesn't apply all across the board. What if you need 64TB of capacity? If people followed the math of the compounding likelihood of failures of multiple drives, no one would store more than 18TB of data. That is what doesn't make sense.

This is a 5TB file server I built back in 2009 with 2x 1.5TB drives and 2x 1TB drives:

fileserver_v2-01.jpg


They were the cost effective option back then, and the operating system (WHS v1) became outdated way before the drives showed signs of failure. Part of the reason is probably because of the uniqueness of the setup that contributed to the drive's longer than normal life (120mm intake for the drives, power supply thermals outside of the case, generous spacing between drives and rubber isolation for each drive).

And things like this can be done with today's drives as well.
 
Bro with Nano, there is literally no fees - whether you want to transfer 1 Rupee or a million USD, as long as it's done in Nano it's instant and fireless.

Yea I agree, I think a bit of self research will help since I think rdst is stuck in the early 2010s public perception of crypto :/
And granted that that has not entirely changed, but it's no longer the actual case with crypto.

Agreed, but my point is that all cryptocurrencies are blockchain based or derivative, and hence cryptos are here to say. Sorry if it came off as blockchain = crypto.
The use case of crypto as a payment system, irrespective of fees, is still quite limited. I certainly use crypto for stuff like servers, VPNs as well as anonymous purchases, but if someone could find the ratio of transactions to speculative trading, it will be miniscule.

The meme push in crypto and recently in the stock markets has thrown the entire basis of value out of the window. The GME and AMC saga is just an extension of what has been happening with crypto since trading blew up. This is no underlying value to what the technology is or what real-world problems are being addressed. The BTC valuation itself indicates that it is simply a case of perceived value. I know people like to push certain coins based on roadmaps but that is generally self-serving as it has no impact on the actual market value of the coin.

Just treat crypto as a speculative bubble as that is what it is. I would like to believe crypto is serving a much larger purpose in society, may be it was envisaged that way, but that is certainly not the case and probably will not be until it is regulated.
 
I don't think there's much math involved in this lol, just that the more drives you have, higher are the odds of one getting a faulty drive. More logic than math tbh
Nope, there's a specific probability equation, but yes it's round about what you and @rsaeon have said. Again, can't be arsed to dig it up.

The logic? I personally believe in both sides of the 'logic'. I prefer small drives because of the same concept of eggs in multiple baskets. But not smaller than required even if the size you need is available. I have 3x2tb drives bought ages ago and 2x8tb bought fairly recently. In my home PC.
If you have a single large drive, and it fails, you've lost all your data unless you've had some redundancy somewhere. But if you have four smaller drives, and three fail, you still have one drive left of data.
I've been doing this for over 25 years now, and experience has taught me one singular truth about hard drives. (Or almost any storage medium really). 100% of hard drives will fail at some point. So the only real redundancy is (multiple) backups for important data. My storage requirements are mostly for media which can be relatively easily re-acquired with needing to be backed up.

And there's also the hypothesis that the manufacturing of lower density drives is far more robust and proven compared to high density drives simply because more of them have been made over the years and the designs have been iterated and improved upon whereas the larger capacity drives have been around for far less, and sell in much less volume, so there have been less opportunities for the manufacturer to improve upon them.
Pretty sure that hypothesis is bollocks, large or small, any drive can randomly fail if you're having a bad day. Just because the platter density is higher doesn't mean it's inherently an inferior design or technology. Drive technology improvements are a periodical and incremental process, and not solely dependent on sales or popularity of a particular capacity segment.

That's a blanket statement, and doesn't apply all across the board. What if you need 64TB of capacity? If people followed the math of the compounding likelihood of failures of multiple drives, no one would store more than 18TB of data. That is what doesn't make sense.
You've pretty much summed up exactly what I've been saying.

If you NEED 64tb will you get 4x16tb or 16 drives of 4tb each just because that's all that's available on Amazon?
The meme push in crypto and recently in the stock markets has thrown the entire basis of value out of the window. The GME and AMC saga is just an extension of what has been happening with crypto since trading blew up. This is no underlying value to what the technology is or what real-world problems are being addressed. The BTC valuation itself indicates that it is simply a case of perceived value. I know people like to push certain coins based on roadmaps but that is generally self-serving as it has no impact on the actual market value of the coin.

Just treat crypto as a speculative bubble as that is what it is. I would like to believe crypto is serving a much larger purpose in society, may be it was envisaged that way, but that is certainly not the case and probably will not be until it is regulated.
This!

They will then argue that even fiat currency has no inherent value and is just a promissory note, just got the sake of arguing. It's just a very small group of people deluding themselves into believing their white elephants are the shit. And those who did convert their crypto into fiat currency or purchased goods/services with that crypto will use that to 'prove' crypto has value while not realising that it's the conversion or purchase that holds the value, not the crypto itself no matter how much it appreciates, because it's just theory in the end
 
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I've read about that math, basically it says the more drives you have, the more chances you have of a failure among them. If one out of ten drives fail, and you have ten drives, then the math says all ten can potentially fail. Because they may have all been the unlucky ones out of ten.

Which sounds horrible, until you think about it.

If you have a single large drive, and it fails, you've lost all your data unless you've had some redundancy somewhere. But if you have four smaller drives, and three fail, you still have one drive left of data.
I don't think there's much math involved in this lol, just that the more drives you have, higher are the odds of one getting a faulty drive. More logic than math tbh
“odds” in other words is math. a topic in statistical analysis called probability.

industry term for drive failures is called MTBF (mean time between failures)

btw, we are getting into a territory called disaster recovery and business continuity. there are many strategies to protect data. from basic stuff like backups to very complex strategies. simple rule of thumb is that just assume that hdds will fail. and you have cloud type systems. all the modern storage solutions have stuff like distributed raid, sharding etc… for file systems like zfs/btrfs/cephfs/erasure-coding more drives is a good thing. find a bad drive; throw it away and put a new one in. file system is smart enough to rebalance.
And there's also the hypothesis that the manufacturing of lower density drives is far more robust and proven compared to high density drives simply because more of them have been made over the years and the designs have been iterated and improved upon whereas the larger capacity drives have been around for far less, and sell in much less volume, so there have been less opportunities for the manufacturer to improve upon them.
this is bs.
 
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“odds” in other words is math. a topic in statistical analysis called probability.

industry term for drive failures is called MTBF (mean time between failures)

btw, we are getting into a territory called disaster recovery and business continuity. there are many strategies to protect data. from basic stuff like backups to very complex strategies. simple rule of thumb is that just assume that hdds will fail. and you have cloud type systems. all the modern storage solutions have stuff like distributed raid, sharding etc… for file systems like zfs/btrfs/cephfs/erasure-coding more drives is a good thing. find a bad drive; throw it away and put a new one in. file system is smart enough to rebalance.

this is bs.
Assuming the mtbf of 4tb and 16tb is the same, would you rather get one 16 or 4x4tb?

Moving on from assumption to real world, shucking 4x4tb gets you 4 smr drives. While the expansion 16 is an exos. Nuff said...
 
Pretty sure that hypothesis is bollocks, large or small, any drive can randomly fail if you're having a bad day. Just because the platter density is higher doesn't mean it's inherently an inferior design or technology. Drive technology improvements are a periodical and incremental process, and not solely dependent on sales or popularity of a particular capacity segment.

this is bs.

Maybe you two should've taken a look at the failure statistics I linked from Backblaze:
  • HGST's 4TB drives have a lower failure rate over 5 years vs their 8TB over 3 years & their 12TB over two years
  • Toshiba's 4TB has a zero failure rate over almost 6 years vs their 14TB over 8 months
  • Similarly, Seagate's 4TB, 6TB, 8TB have a lower failure rate compared to their 10TB, 12TB & 14TB (one of two models)
The data's right there, the general trend is that lower capacity drives last longer than higher capacity drives. It's impossible to miss.

There are a few outliers, and 16TB drives have less than six months of statistics so I didn't include those in this quick comparison.

I've been doing this for over 25 years now,

Respectfully, 2TB drives first came out 12 years ago. Perhaps the knowledge you gained from experience in the years before that is from a time that does not have any relevance now?

Drives used to have terrible reliability in the pre-1TB days, but it's obvious that lower density designs today are far more mature than higher density designs (and thereby attributing to their lower failure rate).

shucking 4x4tb gets you 4 smr drives. While the expansion 16 is an exos. Nuff said...

What good is a 16TB exos with no warranty? It's a sports car with no seatbelts.

If your main purpose for a large drive is media, then SMR/CMR has no meaningful difference since all you're doing is reads after the initial, painful copy of data.

Most FUP's these days are under 4TB, you'll spend four to six months recovering from a 16TB drive failure vs just over a month for a single 4TB failure.

Now if you wanted that 16TB for video editing, in a mirrored array, then two shucked 16TB's make for a convincing argument, on a budget. However, if you're editing videos as source of income, it's more responsible to buy internal drives with warranty instead of shucking.
 
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