3 ms·

Farming: you hold massive (101GB) bingo cards of mathematical proofs on your hard drive. When you receive a challenge, you first do a pre-filter on your bingo c

Farming: you hold massive (101GB) bingo cards of mathematical proofs on your hard drive. When you receive a challenge, you first do a pre-filter on your bingo cards to see which of them could contain a proof. Within that filtered list, you find the closest proofs. The peer with the closest proof available wins the challenge and [currently] gets 2XCH. Plotting: you fill your free space with bingo cards. You need 300-400GB of free temporary space and TBs of writes in that space. This uses a lot of compute and eats SSDs for breakfast. Once you have filled your space (assuming you don't go out and buy more disks), you can stop plotting. This is where the claimed "greenness" of Chia comes into play: you eventually stop using compute resources. Of course, there are whales who are adding drives to their servers daily.

popotamonga 5y ago
I have 512GB Ram, cant it be used for plotting without ssd?
- zamalek 5y ago
  It can be, just set up a RAM disk and use that as your temporary drive. It's exactly what I'm doing to fill my tiny 12TB Raspberry Pi farm. Your plotting rate won't be competitive (plotting in parallel on NVMEs turns out to be much faster).
- lozaning 5y ago
  Yeah, I plot an a DL580 with 512GB. Other than not having to worry about write durability there's not much gained though. GB per GB my ram drive is faster, but i can plot in parallel on my NVME drive because it's considerably larger.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  You could do 1 plot at a time.
- mvanaltvorst 5y ago
  You could. But someone else could add 8 SSD's for the same money and plot multiple times as fast as you, until the SSDs break.
  - dstick 5y ago
    And what happens if the SSDs break? You lose your plot? Has to be right - since it's proof of space? But what then is the use of burning through SSDs so fast?
    - deepserket 5y ago
      the SSDs are used just to create the plots, once the plots are created they can be moved into HDDs where they get farmed (checked to see if they can solve blocks for the blockchain)
vineyardmike 5y ago
Can you explain the "bingo card" analogy in a bit more depth? is this like pre-computing the values to a hash function against different inputs? Where is the write thrashing coming in? If you only need X hundred gigs, why do you write terabytes? Because you can't store intermediary values in RAM (since ram is expensive and small in comparison)? I get how bitcoin style block-chains use hashing to secure the transaction chain, and the POW factors into hashing... how do responding to the challenges factor into a currency?
- zamalek 5y ago
  > Where is the write thrashing coming in? This happens during plotting (not farming). The plots are sorted, which is where the write thrashing happens. Once you've completely plotted a farm, it is never written to. Everything else you said is basically spot-on.
Vespasian 5y ago
Is there an expected limit of storage where your average drive would die of old age before it yields enough income?
- zamalek 5y ago
  No. Once you are farming, the drive is exclusively read. Of course there is bitrot/cosmic rays flipping bits, effectively rendering some portions of the plot corrupt.

popotamonga 5y ago

I have 512GB Ram, cant it be used for plotting without ssd?

zamalek 5y ago
It can be, just set up a RAM disk and use that as your temporary drive. It's exactly what I'm doing to fill my tiny 12TB Raspberry Pi farm. Your plotting rate won't be competitive (plotting in parallel on NVMEs turns out to be much faster).
lozaning 5y ago
Yeah, I plot an a DL580 with 512GB. Other than not having to worry about write durability there's not much gained though. GB per GB my ram drive is faster, but i can plot in parallel on my NVME drive because it's considerably larger.
VectorLock 5y ago
You could do 1 plot at a time.
mvanaltvorst 5y ago
You could. But someone else could add 8 SSD's for the same money and plot multiple times as fast as you, until the SSDs break.
- dstick 5y ago
  And what happens if the SSDs break? You lose your plot? Has to be right - since it's proof of space? But what then is the use of burning through SSDs so fast?
  - deepserket 5y ago
    the SSDs are used just to create the plots, once the plots are created they can be moved into HDDs where they get farmed (checked to see if they can solve blocks for the blockchain)

vineyardmike 5y ago

Can you explain the "bingo card" analogy in a bit more depth? is this like pre-computing the values to a hash function against different inputs? Where is the write thrashing coming in? If you only need X hundred gigs, why do you write terabytes? Because you can't store intermediary values in RAM (since ram is expensive and small in comparison)? I get how bitcoin style block-chains use hashing to secure the transaction chain, and the POW factors into hashing... how do responding to the challenges factor into a currency?

zamalek 5y ago
> Where is the write thrashing coming in? This happens during plotting (not farming). The plots are sorted, which is where the write thrashing happens. Once you've completely plotted a farm, it is never written to. Everything else you said is basically spot-on.

Vespasian 5y ago

Is there an expected limit of storage where your average drive would die of old age before it yields enough income?

zamalek 5y ago
No. Once you are farming, the drive is exclusively read. Of course there is bitrot/cosmic rays flipping bits, effectively rendering some portions of the plot corrupt.