In a Reddit post today, FlexPool has put out a call to action to all Chia farmers, big and small, to help secure the Chia blockchain.
In the post they lay out a very reasonable argument for leaving Hpool and the other OG pools behind, to ensure that Chia remains opensource and to prevent the large custom software pools colluding on an actual 51% attack, or just forking the blockchain for their pools and possibly creating a catastrophe.
The sheer size of that segment of the ecosystem, particularly Hpool, has always caused a fair bit of concern in the Chia community – both because of their totally closed off nature, as well as their size. But now there is a legitimate alternative.
I know a lot of people will see FlexPool’s call to action as self serving – and it is – but it is also a community service. Right now there is a schism software wise between the custom software pools and the official on-chain pools. Assuming everything stays on the up and up that might not even be a huge problem. But right now more than 50% of the netspace is controlled by a few large custom closed-source pools, the largest of which is very non-communicative in the community.
I realize its very tempting to sit back and do nothing. To make Chia someone else’s problem. But this is not the way. As farmers we need to support Chia through every way we can. If you really like HPool they have a new pool plot pool. Go replot and join it as long as it doesn’t require closed source software. I’m not advocating for farmers to join our pool specifically, I’m saying that you need to either solo or run open source software on the new pools to keep Chia safe so that its price/value can stay strong. If Chia fails it shouldn’t be because the ones profiting from it refused to act or support it.
I’m not telling you to delete all your plots today. But consider slowly replotting towards pool plots. And please encourage others to do so. Otherwise Chia will likely just keep going down in price.
I do think that FlexPool is a little overdramatic to a point, the preceding quotes about price are likely not true, and I doubt that Hpool has anything to do with the falling price compared to Tether. But the rest of the point still stands.
So I am going to further Flexpool’s ask, which is to replot to portable plots – something I am in the process of doing myself. But I would like to see Core-Pool and HPool, HuobiPool and Foxypool OG strongly encourage their members to replot to NFT plots. In order to do that they will need to deploy a pool of their own like Foxypool already has, so I also strongly encourage the SpacePools, the FlexPools to help them do so with any technical challenges they face.
In the meantime though, for anyone that is looking to move to NFT plots, I have the following articles about various On-Chain pools you can read. Any of them would be a great alternative to closed source software at this point. Please go read FlexPool’s Reddit post, participate and consider using a secure pool using the on-chain pooling protocol.
Thanks to u/willphule for the tip!
The largest of which is very non-communicative in the community.
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Are you serious, everyday the ‘chia guild’ bans people on all the forums for speaking the truth to power;
The fake-plot attacks on HPOOL for months have been relentless.
As a person closely working with HPOOL I can tell you that every time we send people to talk with the ‘guild’ they are banned and/or insulted.
Since April 2021 Chia-Network has over&over told chia users “Don’t use Hpool”, “Hpool steals your keys”, all dis-information and blatant attempts to destroy peoples businesses.
Now that flex-pool has lost the pool-war to space-pool they want to take out HPOOL, hoping to split the difference with themselves.
Today the price of XCH is now $164 USD, and dropping. Already on HPOOL the OG plots have stabilized and tomorrow is the end of the promotion for ‘PP’ (NFT) already the PP growth has flat-lined.
The largest ‘Official Pool’ is space.pool now at 590PB, and flexpool at 32PB; Space.Pool while may sound large is still less than 4% of HPOOL’s total space; Flexpool is so tiny that they win 2 blocks a day not even enough to run a pool.
For months chia-network told people to ‘wait for the approved pools’ will they came and then the price collapsed so nobody wants to make new plots, and nobody has an incentive to delete old plots.
Stuck;
My biggest issue and the reason why i’m not replotting is that new plots don’t work with any of the forks currently.
Im actually going to put out a counterpoint article today and that’s one of the core points.
I’m on Foxy Pool OG and happily farming 6 alt coin’s, if I replot them I can’t farm the alt coin’s, so staying as I am at the moment with no intention of replotting.
That’s the rub, and i don’t blame you for it. Its an excellent counterpoint to my article
Chia created this problem for themselves by releasing software that created plots that were not ever able to be converted to pooling, bad decisions have consequences, they made the bed your know the rest. I am not an H-pool supporter, I solo farm only, my OG plots are not going anywhere and I’m gong to re-plot them. I find it hilarious that a pool and a journalist think farmers who spent months or weeks plotting have a duty to a network that pre-farmed 97% of all the coins .
Hey I dont think you have a duty to replot and just posted a rebuttal to my own post. I think what I said here is true, but not universal and the self interest angle is real but pretty minimal. I dont disagree with anything you said in this comment.