6 ms·

One interesting thing about chia is that before you can “farm” you have to “plot”. Plotting (generating the files that fill up the hard drive to provide the pro

One interesting thing about chia is that before you can “farm” you have to “plot”. Plotting (generating the files that fill up the hard drive to provide the proof of stake) takes fast SSDs and lots of CPU, if you want to build your farm in any reasonable timeframe. The challenge is that it requires you to buy different sets of hardware to earn chia, and the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily (while you’re filling up hard drives). It seems a cottage industry of plotting services is already developing so that those that want to farm don’t have to invest in the hardware to plot. Farming requires very little CPU and slow disks are not a problem.

theptip 5y ago
If you enjoy building PCs, it's an interesting challenge; plotting and farming have very different performance profiles, and there are multiple strategies for viable builds depending on your expertise (big JBOD vs. raspberry pi with USB drives, etc). Feels a lot like the early BTC/ETH mining days where we were building crates full of GPUs zip-tied together, before ASICs institutionalized the mining process. > the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily I'm not sure if you're ever done plotting; if the network space keeps increasing, then you need to increase the number of plots you maintain to keep up -- else you'll gradually farm fewer over time. I think you probably need more plotting hardware in the initial buildout phase though. Some are already talking about "plotting as a service", selling disks full of plots once they have finished their own plotting. In the spirit of "selling jeans to gold miners", that might be a viable business model.
- wruza 5y ago
  Is there a crash course on chia’s various requirements and models for a new participant? I moderately hate bitcoin for it’s effects on everything, but this one (yet) feels like an adequate thing to support, if their landing page is honest.
  - theptip 5y ago
    A good place to start is the official blog/wiki: https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html Reddit also has some good plotting/farming recommendations among the usual chaff.
    - wruza 5y ago
      Thanks!
londons_explore 5y ago
How slow can these disks be? Could they be tape-drive slow? Or "1 million blurays in a stack" slow?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  From looking at the Chia wiki, the farming process seems to be very slow. Slow enough that a tape- or optical-media robot library would easily keep up with it.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    My reading of the wiki suggests that the time for your disk to read the data really does matter. Chia blocks are every ~20 seconds. Within those 20 seconds, you need to read 7 + 64 different areas of the disk. Some read addresses depend on the last, so in reality you need to do 7 sequential reads, all within the block time to get any reward. So basically, if your storage medium takes over ~1 second to read data, you're going to be throwing away some rewards, and if it takes over ~10 seconds per read, you will barely get any rewards at all. Tape drives are out then, and so is optical media unless it's already in a drive.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Do the 7 initial reads access separate data from the remaining 64, or is the whole "plot" fair game for even those initial reads? ETA: from looking at the docs, it seems that the 7 initial reads do access separate "tables". It should be possible to optimize by storing these on lower-latency storage, and even optimize further via parallel farming of many "plots", of which only a few at any given time will ever need to retrieve the 64 blocks denoting a successful proof. ISTM that tape media has real potential here.
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        The initial 7 reads simply save you from doing the last 64 incase there is no chance of winning. Put those 7 on fast media and you'll very quickly know "I might have won". But without the results from the rest of the 64 reads in a couple of seconds, you won't actually win.

theptip 5y ago

If you enjoy building PCs, it's an interesting challenge; plotting and farming have very different performance profiles, and there are multiple strategies for viable builds depending on your expertise (big JBOD vs. raspberry pi with USB drives, etc). Feels a lot like the early BTC/ETH mining days where we were building crates full of GPUs zip-tied together, before ASICs institutionalized the mining process. > the high performance plotting hardware is only needed temporarily I'm not sure if you're ever done plotting; if the network space keeps increasing, then you need to increase the number of plots you maintain to keep up -- else you'll gradually farm fewer over time. I think you probably need more plotting hardware in the initial buildout phase though. Some are already talking about "plotting as a service", selling disks full of plots once they have finished their own plotting. In the spirit of "selling jeans to gold miners", that might be a viable business model.

wruza 5y ago
Is there a crash course on chia’s various requirements and models for a new participant? I moderately hate bitcoin for it’s effects on everything, but this one (yet) feels like an adequate thing to support, if their landing page is honest.
- theptip 5y ago
  A good place to start is the official blog/wiki: https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html https://chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html Reddit also has some good plotting/farming recommendations among the usual chaff.
  - wruza 5y ago
    Thanks!

londons_explore 5y ago

How slow can these disks be? Could they be tape-drive slow? Or "1 million blurays in a stack" slow?

zozbot234 5y ago
From looking at the Chia wiki, the farming process seems to be very slow. Slow enough that a tape- or optical-media robot library would easily keep up with it.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  My reading of the wiki suggests that the time for your disk to read the data really does matter. Chia blocks are every ~20 seconds. Within those 20 seconds, you need to read 7 + 64 different areas of the disk. Some read addresses depend on the last, so in reality you need to do 7 sequential reads, all within the block time to get any reward. So basically, if your storage medium takes over ~1 second to read data, you're going to be throwing away some rewards, and if it takes over ~10 seconds per read, you will barely get any rewards at all. Tape drives are out then, and so is optical media unless it's already in a drive.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Do the 7 initial reads access separate data from the remaining 64, or is the whole "plot" fair game for even those initial reads? ETA: from looking at the docs, it seems that the 7 initial reads do access separate "tables". It should be possible to optimize by storing these on lower-latency storage, and even optimize further via parallel farming of many "plots", of which only a few at any given time will ever need to retrieve the 64 blocks denoting a successful proof. ISTM that tape media has real potential here.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      The initial 7 reads simply save you from doing the last 64 incase there is no chance of winning. Put those 7 on fast media and you'll very quickly know "I might have won". But without the results from the rest of the 64 reads in a couple of seconds, you won't actually win.