Lordhippos
Pokémon Master
Some people seemed interested in my random large storage purchase, so I wanted to provide a little insight into what I am doing. Before I go further I would highlight that I am not an expert at this so what I say is largely my own opinions, do your own research etc.
Crypto Currency
Before I go into actual space farming and what it is, I'd like to spend a bit of time talking about the crypto currency space. If you want to skip that go down and look for the Space Farming head instead.
The crypto currency markets have had a lot of traction lately, and for good reason. The crypto currency market capitalisation is presently around $2.5T - see Cryptocurrency Prices, Charts And Market Capitalizations | CoinMarketCap. Some individual currencies are worth more than entire massive global organisations. BTC is the most well known of these, I think just about everyone will know what BTC is. Suffice to say that BTC leads the market direction as the largest single entity, if it's up or down almost every crypto currency will follow it to some degree.
The market has been in a bull run generally since the tail end of last year. Will it last forever? I doubt it. Will it collapse into nothing? I also doubt it. It's hard to control or kill off a market that is de-centralised.
Personally speaking when BTC was quite low ($20 each) it was on my radar, it was hard to buy, and it was magic digital currency with very little practical usage. To be honest that is largely still true. I see BTC as very much the equivalent of a store of digital gold, it's a speculative asset that is finite, and hard to get without buying the market rate for it, and that in turn is what is driving it's value.
I think I felt originally that it was a fad, that a currency that burns electric and just exists digitally couldn't be worth much, but how wrong I was. I wish I'd just gambled on it a bit as it would have paid off exceptionally well if I had.
Last time I checked it was something like $11K worth of electricity needed to mine a single BTC on average, that in turn is underpinning a minimum value for BTC in my opinion. I doubt we will see $11K per BTC again, and if we do it will probably be time to buy it.
There are some predictions that BTC could hit as much as $1M per BTC in the next few years. It's currently almost $60K so that is not as insane as it sounds.
Should you put all your money into crypto currency investments? No I don't think so. Should you have some invested? yes I absolutely think so. Crypto markets are highly volatile so as with all investments only ever risk money you can afford to lose, and not lose sleep over.
Chia
Whilst BTC is the forerunner, there are lots of alt coins that solve different challenges or attempt to do so in a different way to BTC. BTC is expensive to mine, slow, unwieldy, but it's the most well known one.
The space farming I am talking about in this post is the Chia project - Home - Chia Network
The main difference between Chia and a lot of other alt coins is that it's aiming to solve the problems of BTC and other alt coins in a different way. Instead of running highly expensive calculations, Chia will operate by having users write .plot files to hard drives that then get "farmed" on the network.
Space Farming
Chia aims to be greener, I think one of it's original goals was that anyone could do it by just making some .plot files with the app and then storing them on random unused storage they had lying about, instead it's become a bit of an arms race. There is not really much hope of ever winning anything if someone just sets an old 3TB hard drive up with 27 plot files, you will have to be really lucky to win anything with that.
As I type this Chia (XCH) is trading at £892 each - https://www.coinbase.com/price/chia-network - and they are very hard to get unless you have a lot of storage and a lot of processing power.
In essence each 100GB .plot file you store and operate on the Chia network is a lottery ticket, the more tickets you have the more chance you have of winning. As it stands right now, a single 100GB plot file is likely to win 2 x XCH tokens in about 18 years on average. If you have two of them, your mean time to win is 9 years, at 4 it's 4.5 years etc. Each .plot file is a ticket on a network made up of tickets. The current network size is 3085.853 PiB - this is actually an insanely large number. You can see the network growth rate here: Chia cryptocurrency blockchain explorer.
My setup
When I came across Chia is was already pretty late on, but I already had some kit in place that made getting into it a little easier.
My home network is hard wired CAT6 so I can send data reasonably fast between my devices, I have a decent gaming PC, and an 8 bay Synology NAS with 5 x 10TB drives in it, and 3 empty slots.
I decided to see what I could do with Chia, and from there I've gone out and upgraded my setup a bit. Stuff in bold = already had it.
Rig 1:
Intel i7 9700K CPU
32GB 3200Mhz DDR4 RAM
2TB Sabrent Rocket NVME
1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVME
Rig 2:
Ryzen 5900X
32GB 3466Mhz DDR4 RAM
2TB Sabrent Rocket NVME x 2
For my storage I bought a bunch, but I had some already.
(48TB) 6 x 8TB WD MyBook
(37TB) 5 x 10TB WD Reds (4 of these are in R5 in my NAS)
(14TB) 1 x 14TB WD Elements
(64TB) 4 x 16TB WD Elements
(64TB) 4 x 16TB Seagate Expansion Drives
So my total storage capacity right now with these drives is 227TB.
Here is how much storage I have assigned to Chia right now:
So right now my estimated time to win is approx. 2 XCH every 3 weeks. If the network carries on growing and I can keep pace with adding more plots, then that chance should stay the same. Eventually I will run out of the ability to add more storage or the desire to buy more storage.
If nothing changes then I should, in theory, gain 2 XCH tokens worth a combined sum of £1784 every 3 weeks or so. Of course things won't stay static like this.
Right now I am able to add about 50-55 plots a day, so approx. 5 - 5.5TB.
Should you go and start farming Chia?
In my opinion, not unless you are really interested in doing it.
As I mentioned earlier you need more and more storage to keep pace with the network. Each plot file (ticket) still has an equal chance to win compared to the others, but the sheer number of tickets keeps on increasing, so if you can't add more storage to the cause eventually you may find you just never win as your number is less and less likely to be lucky.
You also need something permanently connected to the blockchain and the plot files have to sit there passively.
I think there is definitely a time and place for doing this, and I am hoping with my capex and hardware capabilities I can make it pay out in the end (ideal scenario the price keeps going up and I win enough to cover initial costs).
In the end this is a massive lottery. It could pay out well, it could become worthless. I hope for the former.
Crypto Currency
Before I go into actual space farming and what it is, I'd like to spend a bit of time talking about the crypto currency space. If you want to skip that go down and look for the Space Farming head instead.
The crypto currency markets have had a lot of traction lately, and for good reason. The crypto currency market capitalisation is presently around $2.5T - see Cryptocurrency Prices, Charts And Market Capitalizations | CoinMarketCap. Some individual currencies are worth more than entire massive global organisations. BTC is the most well known of these, I think just about everyone will know what BTC is. Suffice to say that BTC leads the market direction as the largest single entity, if it's up or down almost every crypto currency will follow it to some degree.
The market has been in a bull run generally since the tail end of last year. Will it last forever? I doubt it. Will it collapse into nothing? I also doubt it. It's hard to control or kill off a market that is de-centralised.
Personally speaking when BTC was quite low ($20 each) it was on my radar, it was hard to buy, and it was magic digital currency with very little practical usage. To be honest that is largely still true. I see BTC as very much the equivalent of a store of digital gold, it's a speculative asset that is finite, and hard to get without buying the market rate for it, and that in turn is what is driving it's value.
I think I felt originally that it was a fad, that a currency that burns electric and just exists digitally couldn't be worth much, but how wrong I was. I wish I'd just gambled on it a bit as it would have paid off exceptionally well if I had.
Last time I checked it was something like $11K worth of electricity needed to mine a single BTC on average, that in turn is underpinning a minimum value for BTC in my opinion. I doubt we will see $11K per BTC again, and if we do it will probably be time to buy it.
There are some predictions that BTC could hit as much as $1M per BTC in the next few years. It's currently almost $60K so that is not as insane as it sounds.
Should you put all your money into crypto currency investments? No I don't think so. Should you have some invested? yes I absolutely think so. Crypto markets are highly volatile so as with all investments only ever risk money you can afford to lose, and not lose sleep over.
Chia
Whilst BTC is the forerunner, there are lots of alt coins that solve different challenges or attempt to do so in a different way to BTC. BTC is expensive to mine, slow, unwieldy, but it's the most well known one.
The space farming I am talking about in this post is the Chia project - Home - Chia Network
The main difference between Chia and a lot of other alt coins is that it's aiming to solve the problems of BTC and other alt coins in a different way. Instead of running highly expensive calculations, Chia will operate by having users write .plot files to hard drives that then get "farmed" on the network.
Space Farming
Chia aims to be greener, I think one of it's original goals was that anyone could do it by just making some .plot files with the app and then storing them on random unused storage they had lying about, instead it's become a bit of an arms race. There is not really much hope of ever winning anything if someone just sets an old 3TB hard drive up with 27 plot files, you will have to be really lucky to win anything with that.
As I type this Chia (XCH) is trading at £892 each - https://www.coinbase.com/price/chia-network - and they are very hard to get unless you have a lot of storage and a lot of processing power.
In essence each 100GB .plot file you store and operate on the Chia network is a lottery ticket, the more tickets you have the more chance you have of winning. As it stands right now, a single 100GB plot file is likely to win 2 x XCH tokens in about 18 years on average. If you have two of them, your mean time to win is 9 years, at 4 it's 4.5 years etc. Each .plot file is a ticket on a network made up of tickets. The current network size is 3085.853 PiB - this is actually an insanely large number. You can see the network growth rate here: Chia cryptocurrency blockchain explorer.
My setup
When I came across Chia is was already pretty late on, but I already had some kit in place that made getting into it a little easier.
My home network is hard wired CAT6 so I can send data reasonably fast between my devices, I have a decent gaming PC, and an 8 bay Synology NAS with 5 x 10TB drives in it, and 3 empty slots.
I decided to see what I could do with Chia, and from there I've gone out and upgraded my setup a bit. Stuff in bold = already had it.
Rig 1:
Intel i7 9700K CPU
32GB 3200Mhz DDR4 RAM
2TB Sabrent Rocket NVME
1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVME
Rig 2:
Ryzen 5900X
32GB 3466Mhz DDR4 RAM
2TB Sabrent Rocket NVME x 2
For my storage I bought a bunch, but I had some already.
(48TB) 6 x 8TB WD MyBook
(37TB) 5 x 10TB WD Reds (4 of these are in R5 in my NAS)
(14TB) 1 x 14TB WD Elements
(64TB) 4 x 16TB WD Elements
(64TB) 4 x 16TB Seagate Expansion Drives
So my total storage capacity right now with these drives is 227TB.
Here is how much storage I have assigned to Chia right now:
So right now my estimated time to win is approx. 2 XCH every 3 weeks. If the network carries on growing and I can keep pace with adding more plots, then that chance should stay the same. Eventually I will run out of the ability to add more storage or the desire to buy more storage.
If nothing changes then I should, in theory, gain 2 XCH tokens worth a combined sum of £1784 every 3 weeks or so. Of course things won't stay static like this.
Right now I am able to add about 50-55 plots a day, so approx. 5 - 5.5TB.
Should you go and start farming Chia?
In my opinion, not unless you are really interested in doing it.
As I mentioned earlier you need more and more storage to keep pace with the network. Each plot file (ticket) still has an equal chance to win compared to the others, but the sheer number of tickets keeps on increasing, so if you can't add more storage to the cause eventually you may find you just never win as your number is less and less likely to be lucky.
You also need something permanently connected to the blockchain and the plot files have to sit there passively.
I think there is definitely a time and place for doing this, and I am hoping with my capex and hardware capabilities I can make it pay out in the end (ideal scenario the price keeps going up and I win enough to cover initial costs).
In the end this is a massive lottery. It could pay out well, it could become worthless. I hope for the former.
