Its true. I have stopped farming Chia forks entirely. I don’t have anything against them in principle, and I am actually still quite a big fan of Flax and their community. I am also rooting for a number of them to succeed because I think the developers are good folks. But that doesn’t change the reality that it is no longer viable for me to help secure their blockchains.
Why? Because of NFT plots. Yesterday I deleted my last 10 OG plots and replaced them with NFT plots for Chia pooled farming on the on-chain protocol. I don’t want to say which pool I am farming with, but I can say I am very happy with the decision. I have even farmed a block with my NFT plots for the pool I am with and collected the 0.25XCH farmer reward.
Because of my subjective experience here I have no problem recommending to new Chia farmers that they exclusively farm NFT plots and join one of the many excellent Chia pools. But once you have done that your only option for fork farming is to forgo the 7/8 of the block reward that goes to the Pool address. This makes it not worth it. Except for Tad, which has a unique solution to this issue. I think their solution is a bit of a dead end long term, but at least its something and if I had to recommend one for NFT farmers right now to check out it would be them.
This is my challenge I am putting out to fork developers: you have to solve this problem cross chain. You have to be able to read NFT plots off the Chia blockchain and develop a mechanism to farm those plots fully featured. It should be possible, it will just require some custom development that cannot be forked from Chia Network projects. I personally think you all need to work together on this or the spoils will go to whomever solves this problem. If anyone reading this is a fan of one of the Chia fork projects I think you should reach out to the developers and suggest that to them.
Something needs to be done here or the entire ecosystem will suffer.
IMO the “benefits” of pooling were arguable before the forks became excluded. Pay a ~1% fee just to smooth out gains? I am a patient fellow and saw no reason to give up even a measly 1% just for insurance against bad luck that also eliminates the possibility of good luck.
But now, on top of that 1% fee, I lose out on being able to farm whatever fork I wish? That’s much much much too high a price to pay for the “advantages” of pooling for me. I’ll stick with solo farming and farm all the forks I please.
I like that perspective. I dont disagree with the math. Technically I’m way behind right now because i contributed a pool reward to the pool. That said at my farm size (450 plots) i am VERY subject to wild swings in luck so thats where my decision came from, even though so far luck has swung my way.
How big is your farm?
4424 plots. 17 day ETW (and currently 27 days since my last hit, but I hit 3 times before that well below my ETW, so I’m still lucky).. I totally get that it’s emotionally much harder to rely on luck when your ETW goes out to more than a few months, I really do. But mathematically it makes no difference, only emotionally.
Although i basically agree, well I’m a despicable know-it-all when it comes to math 😂
It does make a difference if we assume a stable coin price (or a user that wants to hold anyway) and a rising network space. When within the etw the network growth on average is more than 2 percent you will loose more money than you would loose with the 1 percent fee in the pool.
Anyway: I’m a player. I hope for luck (farm size 1654 plots)
Thats a really good point actually. And if you get lucky early the rising netspace makes the fee worse (since you’re basically getting paid out of your own block for some time)
You’re wrong. The pool takes their fee and reduces variance and all else is equal. Whatever happens with market prices or netspace has no bearing.