Yesterday I posted an article about an argument Flexpool was making in favour of everyone replotting and joining an on-chain pool. I still believe that is a good idea for the reasons listed out in that post, however there are some very good reasons why someone may not want to do that and we will go through those here.
The first, and most obvious, is that it takes a lot of time, has already been done and is hard on SSDs. These are all true, and very good reasons. The need to replot exabytes of plots really puts a dent in the “greener cryptocurrency” label as that is a lot of electricity and compute. It will forever be a stain on the Chia blockchain that this even needed to occur, even if it does and causes no other issues.
The second is that it doesn’t give a whole lot. This is actually true, because over a long enough timespan you should get the same payouts + fees from solo farming or OG pool farming vs on-chain pooling (minus fees). This is hard to argue against, and anyone who is solo plotting probably shouldn’t bother to be honest if maximizing profit is your primary motive. Replotting will only harm that goal, not help it.
The third reason is because “screw you Chia, I don’t have to do anything for your benefit”. This is absolutely true, but actually easy to dispel; Chia Network doesn’t actually care either way as long as the network is secure. Solo farming is fine. On-chain pooling is fine. Hpool is fine too, as long as they don’t use their size to organize a blockchain takeover with the other large custom software companies. The biggest benefit to doing this is because if a 51% attack occurs, or if there is a big Dev vs Pool war like the Bitcoin Blocksize disputes, then the fact that the OG pools have to use custom software could be a real big problem for the price of the assets you are holding. But that’s a big if, and a remote risk does not mean you should have to replot.
The fourth argument against replotting is my favorite, and gives me personally the biggest hesitation to replotting. And that is the forks. Right now none of the Chia forks support the Chia blockchain NFT plots. Some support the same technology, such as Flora, but they do not support the same NFTs used to sign the portable plots. This is a huge problem, and if everyone were to move over every plot right away it would mostly kill the forks. I do not want this to happen, and I think it is vital that the forks create a mechanism to read the NFT plots off the Chia Blockchain or they are at great risk. There is some conspiracy thinking out there that the reason for the NFT plot architecture is to kill the forks, but I don’t think its true. First they aren’t a threat, and second the plan was in place prior to any forks launching. But the effect is still the same, with a massive threat to the viability of the Chia Fork ecosystem.
If you are on the fence about replotting to NFT plots and you are happily farming with Hpool or Core-Pool, or you are a big fan of the Chia Fork ecosystem there is a good argument to be made that you shouldn’t replot. I’m curious to hear what people think. Here are a list of the Off-Chain pools we have covered, and other than Hpool who did not talk to me after I tried to reach out, I honestly think they are fine and have the same motivations and similar incentives to the on-chain pools.
Keep Chia safe, decentralized, and open source. – flexpool management
Chia is open-source, HPOOL doesn’t control the chia-network, Bram&Gene do.
Trex a gpu-miner that is #1 on your Flex-pool for ETH is also closed-source, I don’t see you calling for a boycott on trex ( hypocrisy runs deep)
Hpool is the 500LB gorilla, somebody told you to expend your resource of having flexpool and a very good ETH pool, and convinced you to setup a chia-nft/pp pool, now that its up and operating you have less than 0.2% of the space, where space.pool has 4%, and HPOOL still as +80% of the total space;
Insult to injury your 32pb means you win 2 blocks a day, which means you pool users are win nothing, while hpool is winning block every 2-3 minutes;
What does any good company do in such a crisis? Well of course they call on the world to ‘boycott’ their competition,
(1) Chia isn’t safe, it has the worst security of any crypto around. Fact. Some 50% of all chia-users have had their coins stolen, just check out the github complaints.
(2) HPOOL makes chia decentralized, if not for HPOOL all the control of chia would be in a few western company’s, now its diversified all over the earth.
(3) Open-Source: This is a joke your own pool flex-pool makes all its money on ETH mining, where the #1 miner is t-tex which is closed-source. Nobody with a quality product, that’s bug free, that’s miles ahead of the competition makes their source open and loses their competitive advantage after all their hardwork. Let’s make your argument real by demanding that t-rex open their source.
The fact is there is no valid reason to re-plot; Glad you have joined the good team.
All the arguments all along for PP, NFT, … were all mis-information. As foxy-pool has shown its no problem to create a pool for OG;
Hpool now has OG & PP; There would be no users of HPOOL PP(NFT) if it were not for the air-drops of free xch, that’s how bad this has become. Just been extended to the end of the month 16xch/day; Who is paying for this HPOOL or CHIA-NETWORK? The first air-drop failed so they extended today;
What’s next? Mandatory Re-plots like mandatory vaccination?
Maybe people are tired of plotting, tired of burning up HDD’s & NVME’s; Chia exhaustion is a real thing.