Update: Custom Computing has put out a guide for Mad Max plotting with NFT / Portable Plots for Chia Pools
Now that it has been a few weeks it is time for an update to the Mad Max plotter and the question to “is it safe?”. The answer seems to be yes. It has received a ton of scrutiny, the Chia team have been looking over it directly and have recommended it in certain situations. Mad Max himself has been publicly available and showing his face in interviews. But is it better?
The answer is, it depends. If you have a server system with many low clockspeed cores it will almost certainly be much faster. If you have a CPU optimized for gaming you may be better off running the built in plotter with multiple instances instead. If you have 128GB of ram or more it can be a lot better, as it can reduce the wear on your plotting drive 2/3. If you have a national laboratories supercomputer it might be much, much faster.
The main issue I was concerned about what the quality of the plots, as it uses a slightly different mechanism. Bram himself, although not the final authority, knows a lot more about this than I do and says that they aren’t exact but the differences are so minor it wont make a difference. Considering how many values are stored in a plot missing a couple wont make a difference.
The choice is yours. I am still plotting with the built in plotter because I am a dinosaur. But when portable plots finally launch I may switch. We will be developing a Mad Max plotting guide in next couple days, so check back for that. In the mean time, check out this YouTube guide by Custom Computing.
