This is a question being asked every day on every Chia forum on the internet. It is a good question, and it is hard to answer. The thing about Chia is that the win rate is a pure numbers game. There are so many changes (roughly 4608 a day) that the probability curve will even out over relatively small time frames (a few years) even with small probabilities. Unless you happen to have a datacenter ready to come online you probably arent looking at making a ton of coins fast and up front, so what can you expect?
The first problem with this question is that you need a timeframe in mind to ask it properly. What can you expect over a few weeks? Very little, even once pools come in and basically nothing farming solo. However, over a few years and we can do some math.
The second problem with this question is that it requires knowledge of what the netspace will be to answer, not just what it is today. The growth is still very fast, but showing signs of slowing already. Let’s presume that the netspace stabilizes around 20 EiB. There is a good chance it goes higher, but 20 EiB is easy to illustrate the numbers with.
If you have 40TB of plots on a netspace of 20EiB you can expect to win a block roughly every 3 months. Sometimes it will come faster and sometimes it will come slower. But over the course of 5 years like that you can expect 40 Chia if you can simply get your 0.0002% of the netspace and hold it.
But what does it take to hold it? You have to add 2 plots for every 100 Petabytes of space added to the netspace. Because thats happening every 2 – 6 hours or so right now its very daunting, but on a stabilized network it should be much more doable.
It is also important to think of your reward in Chia and not in your home currency. The price of the con is fluctuating wildly right now and the reward system too slow to pin your plans against current pricing. Unless you are selling coin to pay staff or bills, right now you should set a minimum viable price for your setup and plan against that instead of the current price. If it goes below that then you will have some soul searching to do.
When pools come to Chia in the near, but not too near future we will have a lot more options to begin recouping a hardware investment beyond gambling and selling drives on Ebay.
