At first glance, mining the Chia cryptocurrency is a "bonanza": disks pay off in two weeks, you don't need a powerful one. computer, you can use any hard drives, you don't need a lot of electricity, you don't need fast internet and big traffic volume.
But there are nuances.
Chia is currently worth around $ 1080 per coin.
When mining on a pool, the income from a 4 TB disk is about 0.3 XCH per month, which is $ 324 or ~ 24,000 rubles at the current exchange rate. An external 4TB disk with a USB interface could only recently be bought for 9,000 rubles, but even at the current prices of about 11,200 rubles, the disk "fights back" and begins to generate income in two weeks.
But can't everything be so simple and "rosy"? Of course it can't! :)
There are four nuances.
First. In order to start mining Chia, the disks must first be "seeded" (Chia are such seeds, therefore all terms associated with this cryptocurrency are agricultural).
The seeding or plotting process is very resource intensive. One standard raft, 100 GB in size, on a powerful computer with a SATA SSD drive, with a volume of 480 GB or more, takes about 16 hours to create. It will take almost a month (640 hours) to seed a 4TB drive.
If the computer is not very powerful, and it does not have an SSD drive, 4 terabytes plotting can take a year.
When using an NVMe SSD directly connected to the PCI Express bus and having a write speed higher than 2 GB / s, as well as large amount of memory (from 16 GB), the seeding rate of the raft can reach 3 hours (4 TB will be seeded in 120 hours or 5 days).
As far as I understand, you can sow on one maximally powerful computer, and "reap", that is, mine on the second one with any configuration (an old Celeron and 2 GB of memory will be enough). There are also no requirements for mining disks other than the fact that they must have a size of 1 TB or more. Again, if I understand correctly, during mining there is no writing to disks, information from them is only read and then in very small volumes.
In theory, it is probably possible to organize a conveyor: the first computer continuously sows new disks, which are transferred to the second as they are sown.
The second nuance is that you can mine with regular income only in a pool (combining a large number of miners into a single system in which the regularly received "win" is divided among all, in accordance with the number of rafts each). Now Chia does not officially support the pools yet, but two unofficial Chinese pools, Hpool and UUpool, are already working, which simply need to give the keys to their wallet at their own peril and risk. Uupool is all in Chinese, Hpool has not only Chinese, but also English interface, but requires authorization by phone number, but SMS does not come to numbers in Russia, Ukraine and Great Britain. You will need a SIM card with the number of some other country.
The third nuance is that the number of people involved in mining Chia is constantly increasing, respectively, the complexity of mining increases and income decreases. Nobody knows how long such super profits will last as it is now.
The fourth nuance is that no one knows what the Chia course will be like in the future. As long as it stays above $ 1000, it is very profitable to mine, but it can go up or down to any value.
For the sake of experiment, I took a couple of 4TB hard drives, but so far nothing good has come of it: I do not have a computer with enough power to seed them. An old computer with a 120-gigabyte SSD struggled for a day, after which it gave an error, without even starting to create the first raft. 120 gigabytes stupidly ran out (to create a 100 gigabyte raft, you need about 350 GB of space on a fast disk).
By the way, I got an idea.
Many companies rent virtual servers that can be quite powerful. It is possible that they can be adapted for Chia plotting. We'll have to really download 100-gigabyte rafts, but it's not so scary: people are downloading 100-gigabyte rips of 4K movies and nothing. Perhaps in the near future, the Chia cloud plotting industry may appear, because buying a powerful computer just in order to he once "seeded" several hard drives, in most cases there is no point, and mining Chia on old computers I want to.
© 2021, Alexey Nadezhin
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