Chia Plotting Service in India

Lets do a thought experiment...
suppose, you have few plots. (in normal terms... files)
instead of storing them on the hdds locally, put them into cloud (say aws) as objects instead. pay the cloud provider money for the storage used....
now, when you get your money back from chia, how much money one can make after taking out the expenses paid for aws, and local cpu usage (power+cooling) plus the hardware(the beefy mining computer) ????

Nothing
It's more of a lottery, a total of 32 chia coins are handed out every 5 minutes or so that somehow has to be distributed across pools/individuals with a total of over 5 exabytes of storage on the network last time I checked.
You could get lucky and get rewarded 1 coin even with low number of plots (highly improbable) or you could get nothing for months.
This spreadsheet shows the probability of winning.


 
Each file is around 101gigs. That's not so wise to upload or download.
I have a Google folder with unlimited storage which I got for Rs.500/- per year and I still don't think it is a good idea as my services provider gives a max of 3.3tb per month which theoretically I can finish in just about a day.
 
Nothing
It's more of a lottery, a total of 32 chia coins are handed out every 5 minutes or so that somehow has to be distributed across pools/individuals with a total of over 5 exabytes of storage on the network last time I checked.
You could get lucky and get rewarded 1 coin even with low number of plots (highly improbable) or you could get nothing for months.
This spreadsheet shows the probability of winning.


I'm not an expert on crypto but this seems like the biggest hint that chia is bordering on a scam.

If you have enough compute power (and time), in theory, you will guaranteed be able to mine some amount of (bit)coin, but with chia it's a lottery.

Also: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pny-admits-reducing-ssd-write-endurance-chia-coin-boom

It won't affect regular users at all i think, but should work wonders for chia miners.

I do feel these discussions should be in a separate thread though, not a marketplace one. My bad too!
 
Chia is at an early stage. There are no [OFFICIAL] pools. Every other crypto works in this way. Try finding a block reward of ETH on your own right now. Good luck. People who mined/farmed end march and early may got there XCH because the difficulty was super low. Right now the netspace growth rate is so high that you can't keep up with it.
 
It's more of a lottery, a total of 32 chia coins are handed out every 5 minutes or so that somehow has to be distributed across pools/individuals with a total of over 5 exabytes of storage on the network last time I checked.

It's 18EB today, and it's a statistical lottery, if you're patient enough.

You could get lucky and get rewarded 1 coin even with low number of plots (highly improbable) or you could get nothing for months.

Or even years. This is not a get-rich-quick thing, not even in the slightest. It's a use-your-free-space-for-chia-plots-in-the-hope-that-you'll-earn-some-XCH-in-the-next-few-years thing.

But, there are now three unofficial pools that offer regular payments, and people who have invested heavily into this are positive about them and only regret not joining one sooner. The founders kind of messed up the potential that Chia could have had, by not having official pool support from the beginning. But then they only predicted a 5 EB netspace by the year's end. And they did not expect the launch price to surge so high that everyone and their grandmother would pile on the netspace.
 
Chia is at an early stage. There are no [OFFICIAL] pools. Every other crypto works in this way. Try finding a block reward of ETH on your own right now. Good luck. People who mined/farmed end march and early may got there XCH because the difficulty was super low. Right now the netspace growth rate is so high that you can't keep up with it.
There's a difference between early adoption gains (like with Bitcoin as well) and this lottery reward system. Both can't be equated.
 
There's a difference between early adoption gains (like with Bitcoin as well) and this lottery reward system. Both can't be equated.

Err AFAIK BTC had the same lottery like system. It;s just that the difficulty was pretty low in the beginning so you could get block rewards much easier. Chia has grown extremely fast. If you know what to do you can easily get consistent rewards right now with CHIA with a little risk attached.
 
Err AFAIK BTC had the same lottery like system. It;s just that the difficulty was pretty low in the beginning so you could get block rewards much easier. Chia has grown extremely fast. If you know what to do you can easily get consistent rewards right now with CHIA with a little risk attached.

BTC didn't have a lottery system, mining became more difficult after over 10 years of existence. Chia launched 3 months ago and chances of earning block rewards are already low for an individual and diminishing more as time goes by.
What exactly are Chia plots filled with ? It's just junk data and a waste of 18 million Terabytes as it stands especially during times when there are already shortages.
 
BTC didn't have a lottery system, mining became more difficult after over 10 years of existence. Chia launched 3 months ago and chances of earning block rewards are already low for an individual and diminishing more as time goes by.
What exactly are Chia plots filled with ? It's just junk data and a waste of 18 million Terabytes as it stands especially during times when there are already shortages.

Mining becoming difficult is = lottery system. What is solving cryptograhs useful for. By that logic any type of mining is useless. [which honestly, it is]
 
Mining becoming difficult is = lottery system. What is solving cryptograhs useful for. By that logic any type of mining is useless. [which honestly, it is]

Which is why no one mines BTC anymore except for the miners with their ASIC farms in China and other countries.

What is solving cryptograhs useful for. By that logic any type of mining is useless. [which honestly, it is]

Not denying. Point was BTC is a waste of resources but Chia, even bigger so.
 
Mining becoming difficult is = lottery system.
I think you're confusing increasing computational complexity with a lottery which is just statistical/mathematical probability. I.e. the odds of winning are xyz. With Bitcoin if you have a powerful enough processor, you WILL earn. Nothing to do with 'odds'.

Again, there's another thread in general called chia coins. If the mods would be so kind as to move all these posts to that thread and clean up this one. :)
 
More after I figure out Input/Output errors for CIFS shares under Linux.

So it turns out that this could have been one of three reasons. The errors happened after the file was transferred and upon the 'file close' operation which I assume to mean writing metadata. The Ubuntu VM had the wrong timezone configured so either (1) windows was rejecting the file date as it was in the future or (2) HD sentinel was also installed on the Windows VM and it was configured by default to modify the drive icon with one that showed a bar graph on capacity, and the file close operation conflicted with the bar graph icon being updated or (3) some kind of NTFS corruption since response times were in the 1000's of milliseconds as this drive was on PCH lanes.

I fixed the timezone, closed HD Sentinel, and selected another folder on another drive for sharing and there are no more errors. I'll experiment later to pinpoint which of these three it was.

Plotting times seem to have stabilized at between 5:30 to 6:00 per plot with pechy's combined tree chiapos, which is pretty excellent. I have 16 concurrent plots configured with a 30 minute stagger, and a max limit of 4 plots in phase 1 but the queue never exceeds 11-12 plots since they finish so fast. I'll try lowering the stagger to 25 or 20 mins later and see if that increases the number of concurrent plots.

Screen Shot 2021-06-07 at 2.08.32 PM.png


The bane of SMR drives is that if and when the CMR cache runs out then writing speeds drop to a positively ancient number at under 10MB/s, and it may take several hours for the CMR cache to be flushed out. HDD manufacturers have stated that SMR is here to stay, and that it should be countered in software. I'm guessing that means pooling writes between multiple drives, so that each individual drive has time to recover and flush it's CMR cache.

So then it's recommended to have a staging drive, an SSD that buffers all the plots and writes them at it's leisure to the mechanical drives. Otherwise the queue may be held up by a plot taking almost an hour to copy. Swar's plot manager does allow you to configure multiple drives to be used in a round robin fashion (sequentially) but then again, the number of plots per day suffers if even one of them encounters the CMR cache limit, and with multiple SMR drives you could potentially have many destination drives holding up the plotting queue. So an SSD cache is the better option for high output plotting (vs multiple destination drives). But now we need to get plots off the staging drive and to our destination drives and at the same time avoiding hitting the CMR cache limit of each destination drive.

MergerFS has policies that unintentionally accomplish this, I'm using the 'most free space' policy. Let's say I have a MergerFS pool of 8 drives with this policy, and they're all empty. When I copy a plot, that 101GB goes to one of the drives in the pool. Then I wait 30mins for the next plot to finish, and MergerFS assigns one of the other 7 drives. And then for the third plot, one of the 6 remaining drives. And so on. So it takes about 4 hours/8 plots, before one of the drives is written to a second time. But it could be just as well #8 instead of #1, and if it's #8 then the CMR cache wouldn't have had time to flush and we're back to super slow transfer speeds.

Budgetary limitations prevent me from investing in another SSD, so I'm using 1.5TB of NVMe storage that's on another VM, in another host that's connected to this host with the plotting VM by 2.5G ethernet. I've rate limited this connection to 200MB/s for QoS reasons (this other host has 100+ VM's that need some bandwith). So with this setup, we see network utilization graphs like this:

Screen Shot 2021-06-07 at 9.40.41 AM.png


The green areas are this Staging VM receiving the plots, and the blue areas are the plots being transferred back to the host of the OpenMediaVault VM with MergerFS (which incidentally, is the same host as the Plotting VM's. So basically, these plots go on a long drive through a scenic route before reaching their permanent home. Also in this graph are healthy gaps, which means we haven't reached the CMR cache of any of the drives yet.

To monitor the staging drive and automatically transfer drives over, I'm using a very simple powershell script that calls upon robocopy. I found this chia2drive.ps1 script over at https://kostya.blog/2021/05/01/full-chia-plotting-automation-in-windows/ and it's been working flawlessly.

I've also started pointing other plotting VM's at this staging drive to streamline the plot copying process, but this has lead to some (manageable) traffic congestion:

Screen Shot 2021-06-07 at 2.01.27 PM.png


The green areas are plots coming in the staging drive and the blue areas are the automatic copying of these plots to the destination drives, it's set to a 15 minute timer so that explains the gap in the blue.

Overall this setup, while complicated, is working beautifully.
 
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It's 18EB today, and it's a statistical lottery, if you're patient enough.



Or even years. This is not a get-rich-quick thing, not even in the slightest. It's a use-your-free-space-for-chia-plots-in-the-hope-that-you'll-earn-some-XCH-in-the-next-few-years thing.

But, there are now three unofficial pools that offer regular payments, and people who have invested heavily into this are positive about them and only regret not joining one sooner. The founders kind of messed up the potential that Chia could have had, by not having official pool support from the beginning. But then they only predicted a 5 EB netspace by the year's end. And they did not expect the launch price to surge so high that everyone and their grandmother would pile on the netspace.
hpool , chia.core and ?
Whic pool do you recommend to join ?
 
hpool , chia.core and ?
Whic pool do you recommend to join ?

AZPool, I think. I don't remember exactly. Flexpool will also be available soon.

I do not need to see regular returns on investment on this so I would not join a pool at this point, but people appear to be very happy with HPOOL. Chia Core's developers wish to remain anonymous which has led others to question their trustworthiness and credibility. But some users have reported better earnings than with HPOOL.

Just keep in mind, to join pools at this point means to give up your private key so basically you no longer own the wallet that you used to create your plots. You'll need to create a second wallet to receive pool payments.
 
Wrong thread mate, that should go into tech news i think.

The bane of SMR drives is that if and when the CMR cache runs out then writing speeds drop to a positively ancient number at under 10MB/s, and it may take several hours for the CMR cache to be flushed out...

Gaah, you're almost provoking me to dig up the past, but ima be a gentleman and won't say i told you so... :p
 
AZPool, I think. I don't remember exactly. Flexpool will also be available soon.

I do not need to see regular returns on investment on this so I would not join a pool at this point, but people appear to be very happy with HPOOL. Chia Core's developers wish to remain anonymous which has led others to question their trustworthiness and credibility. But some users have reported better earnings than with HPOOL.

Just keep in mind, to join pools at this point means to give up your private key so basically you no longer own the wallet that you used to create your plots. You'll need to create a second wallet to receive pool payments.
Same , i also thought of hpool as its already running pools for other crypto
 
Same , i also thought of hpool as its already running pools for other crypto

The third one is Bluepool.io

They say you can plot with all of your threads. Someone can try this as Linux is not my forte.

It's not recommended to run someone else's compiled binary (because you shouldn't trust anything but the official software when it comes to anything blockchain), but someone did compile it for windows: https://github.com/madMAx43v3r/chia-plotter/issues/74 (they've also released their source for code review).

People have reported that plot times for a 5900x came down to ~33 minutes, but you can run only one at a time. So the actual plots per day remain the same. But if you have a ~110GB RAM disk that you can use for temp2, then you have the benefit of saving your SSD from 75% of the writes, which adds a whole new dimension to plotting (more SSDs become viable, not just the high TBW ones).

But then again, I'm stressing again, do not buy new hardware for Chia that you do not have a secondary use for. Everything from plotting machines to storage devices. XCH continues to fall, netspace continues to grow, there's no forseeable ROI for any hardware investment at these current trends. ETH mining veterans who went on spending sprees are disposing of their hardware along with their plots at far below market rates because they see no profitable way out.

Chia plots only make sense for you to use your existing unused storage space, because you can always delete plots when you need to make actual use of your storage.
 
Everything from plotting machines to storage devices. XCH continues to fall, netspace continues to grow, there's no forseeable ROI for any hardware investment at these current trends. ETH mining veterans who went on spending sprees are disposing of their hardware along with their plots at far below market rates because they see no profitable way out.
This is the best news I've heard in a while!
 
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