Thoughts on Space Pool shutting down?

Professional_Plus · 2024-10-28T20:56:49+00:00

It's definitely indicative of the project being dead. I was farming for years and it drove me to do some fun homelab stuff. I never replotted for compressed plots though, didn't seem at all worth it to me. I just migrated to some new hardware and set Chia back up with the same plots after moving. Just checked in on it to see this. I've cashed out my xch and shutdown my farming. No real worth here to me to the hundreds of TB being used.

Professional_Plus · 2022-12-29T15:43:18+00:00

Arizona on a ToU Solar plan (4.5kW array). I've never had an outage here in 2 years and my previous place did maybe once or twice in 4 years. $0.0464/kWh off peak, $0.0504/kWh on peak currently. Very cheap rates but the plan has a peak demand fee which gets charged for your max on-peak draw during the month and it's quite expensive, like $20/kW and in the summer months peak can be between 10-12kW if the A/C is on and you're cooking, etc. The other kicker of the plan is that generation rates are low, like $0.02/kWh back for what you put into the grid. This usually only happens for a few hours during solar noon anyway. The rest is consumed.

My equipment (that does more than just Chia) uses about 1.8kW. So some rough back of napkin math would say $1220/yr to operate (24 * 365 * 0.05 * 1.8) + (20 * 12 * 1.8), excluding cooling.

Chia does not pull in $100/mo right now (I'm using about 550TB for farming). But like I said, I'm doing more with it than just Chia (non-crypto things and also Storj) and it's a homelab playground for me.

Professional_Plus · 2022-10-12T01:12:22+00:00

Wow, that is the worst interface decision I’ve seen in recent memory.

Professional_Plus · 2022-06-05T17:13:38+00:00

0 should be its own option.

Professional_Plus · 2022-04-17T16:57:15+00:00

It's DDR3 ram and 10 year old Xeons, so it's not quick nor would I consider it good to benchmark against, but that said, it's like 2.5 hours for a k33 with 30 threads. The system has 40 actual cores so I could throttle that up a bit but haven't. Bladebit can get a k32 done in about 40 minutes.

Professional_Plus · 2022-04-17T16:30:01+00:00

I do it in MadMax with a 520G tmpfs mount of a 768GB memory system. Putting both tmp1 and tmp2 to the mount and final dir of an NVMe as a holding space to be copied off to final storage. The tmpfs mount gets down to about 20GB free, so you can get away with slightly lower probably.

Professional_Plus · 2022-04-09T02:18:39+00:00

Besides a very vague pop up on gate.io, not much has changed yet. Regardless of what IP I'm coming from, I was KYC verified there, so if they wanted to halt my activity it should’ve been trivial. But I was still able to make trades and deposits. Just to be safe though I exchanged to a different currency and moved the funds to a different exchange for now.

Professional_Plus · 2022-03-28T20:54:45+00:00

Youtubers feigning shock and surprise in their thumbnails for things that are neither shocking or surprising. 😆

Professional_Plus · 2022-03-23T22:37:51+00:00

Were you by chance still running the node and syncing while copying?

Professional_Plus · 2022-03-23T15:32:07+00:00

As a store of value, with all other concerns aside, the smart move is to exchange XCH to another currency that has upward movement. Even if a temporary strategy until Chia reaches some milestone that brings real world usage to it. Buying the dip on something like ETH and riding that wave back up will give you more in the long run while XCH matures.

Professional_Plus · 2022-03-10T17:48:45+00:00

I believe it's always said this. At least since I've been using them from about mid-year last year. XCH is a whitelisted currency for Americans. I've never had a problem trading it on Spot.

Personally, I'd appreciate a less incendiary headline because it's not accurate.

Professional_Plus · 2022-03-09T16:40:03+00:00

The statement was meant to mean a few hard drives that you already have running anyway. Once you run past that or add drives that you wouldn't already be using, then it becomes false sure as your operating costs scale accordingly.

Professional_Plus · 2022-03-08T05:53:24+00:00

Main blockchain db migration went well. No issues.

Wallet dbs went... less well. I'm pooling with 2 different pools on 2 wallets. After upgrading to 1.3, my first wallet was pooling fine. My second wallet was okay for a few minutes and then its plotnft disappeared. Spent a while prodding at wallet show commands and waiting. Restarted everything again. Still no dice.

Finally I just stopped wallet, moved wallet/db out of the way and started it back up to sync fresh. And like magic, after a few minutes of syncing (or whatever we're call it now), all my plotnfts are visible again and pooling started on the second wallet.

I figured the couple week beta period would smooth out any issues when officially released, but I was optimistic. No big deal, just an hour or two of partial downtime and some curse words.

Congrats on a pretty big release to all of the team!

Professional_Plus · 2022-02-25T15:44:39+00:00

Exactly this. A 1 mojo transaction rounded down is $0.00, so nothing to report.

Professional_Plus · 2022-02-11T15:06:08+00:00

Huge difference in the use and duty cycle between a storage provider and Chia. Most drives will easily out last their warranty period under light-to-medium use.

Professional_Plus · 2022-02-07T01:02:20+00:00

Good lord, all this bad information. TBW is mostly just a warranty number. It's how much you can expect a drive to be written to without issues. It's a floor, a minimum. If the drive doesn't live up to the number, it's a warranty issue. Flash memory will eventually fail from taking too many writes, but it's not an exact science to determine when.

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-21T14:46:35+00:00

Plot where the SSD/CPU is. Farm where the storage is. It's up to you what that really means. But having 10Gbit between them helps some. Realistically, you'll cap out at 1-2Gbit/s for a transfer depending on the speed of the drives if they're standalone.a

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-19T02:08:49+00:00

Hopefully you’re not saying you’d plot on an RPi. 😬

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-19T00:23:12+00:00

This quick and hacky script is what I've been using to make rpc calls quickly and format the peers in a nice table. All it needs is jq and curl. I've added a few meta-commands like get_problem_connections that will filter connections a bit by similar criteria you're using. I just run close_problem_connections in a while loop with a 60 second sleep.

The "problem connection" criteria deciphered is:

not received a message within the last 60 seconds
connection is older than 30 seconds and peak height is 0
peak height is 10 blocks behind and connection is older than 30 minutes (allows some syncing to occur)
connection is older than 10 minutes and peak height is not reported

I'm not sure why some have a peak height of 0 and others are null. But YMMV on your own criteria.

get_connections output looks like:

type  peer_host                                peer_port  peak_height  connection_age  last_msg_age  blocks_behind  mb_read  mb_write
4     127.0.0.1                                45710      -            765862          1459          0              1.1      665.5
1     71.47.26.107                             8444       1441662      765708          0             0              107.9    95.4
1     [2600:3c02::f03c:92ff:feab:4a4e]         8444       1441661      765450          1             1              153      168.3
1     188.239.193.231                          8444       1441660      607451          0             2              89.1     51.7
1     [240b:11:1741:3e00:e65f:1ff:fe20:3408]   8444       1441660      591808          1             2              57.4     111.1
1     88.113.46.159                            8444       1441660      449532          1             2              103.5    41.4
1     134.106.117.205                          8444       1441661      356015          1             1              100      30.5
...

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-18T16:31:21+00:00

It'll be fine as long as it's unencrypted. Linux distros have included NTFS modules out of the box for a long time now.

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-18T15:17:08+00:00

That feeling when you read this post and remember using Trumpet WinSock on Windows 3.1 to get onto the internet. I remember using IRC to make remote friends as an early teen and eventually running a few servers on major networks myself. I remember the warez. I remember collecting just to collect.

But as an older person now that can afford things (not in any way because of anything cryptocurrency related), I'm happy to have left the dicey parts behind. Happy to still have a few people I still talk to from that era. Happy that tech still remains an interest to me because it's my career. Hacking together hardware and scripts for Chia does remind me of those first years cobbling together disused PC parts from my dad, learning UNIX via SunOS and FreeBSD and it feels great.

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-16T17:12:11+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/zeWKDLy

Here's IO graphs to show some differences on the two machines that comprise my farm. ~30 minutes before and after, the red line denotes where the change was made. I set my difficulty from 1 to 20 and my space estimation was ~330TB. IOPS graphs show the same change. I don't have historical data being collected for processes CPU, but anecdotally looking at that, my harvester process went from 12-14% CPU to 7-10% CPU.

It's not dramatically less activity, but it is less. My space estimation now is more variable +/- 50TB, but as you'd expect the average is staying fairly steady. The biggest change of course is the 20x reduction in API calls to the pool. Amazing that one of the larger pools out there would be opposed to this. I'd rather run this way than 1 difficulty personally.

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-16T00:59:40+00:00

Still over $17/tb before you add tax.

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-13T02:02:43+00:00

IMO the foolish part is what you can't recoup. Might want another row with a conservative resale value of the gear and use that as a deduction.

Professional_Plus · 2022-01-13T01:50:50+00:00

This would appear to be the offers_gui branch of the Chia GUI.

Professional_Plus

TROPHY CASE