Last Friday Chia held another Ask me Anything on Zoom and YouTube to go over the state of Chia and the Chia ecosystem. For this Chia AMA I was not able to attend live, and my family has been sick with the flu for a week so I haven’t had a chance to take a look until this morning. There were a few important topics covered, so I will touch on them here but if you are really interested in any of them you should check out the AMA on YouTube here.
They spoke a bit about Projects Atari and Asteroids, gave a small update to that and promised a demo of their Data Layer solution they are building. To hear Gene explain it it will be a mechanism for allowing disparate low-trust database owners to keep their databases synchronized using an on-chain singleton to track sync state. There are a few ways of doing this with Public Key Infrastructure and x509 certificates but they are clunky and if Chia can create a seamless mechanism of setting up a distributed cluster like this it could be useful.
They also addressed the PoolHarvest shut down and the claims that their focus on business is eliminating the farming community. The argument Chia made here is basically what I would have expected, right or wrong. That their focus is long term and hasn’t changed, and that anyone with a very short horizon will be disappointed. Again, I think the problem is more nuanced than that, and the fact that they are leading their marketing messaging with the number of nodes in play means they should probably do something to preserve that number. That said, they are – some folks just don’t like what they are doing. And there is definitely room for improvement.
They touched on a number of short topics, including the Plot Shrinker, JM Hands’ efforts to get datacenters to stop destroying working hard drives when they are decommissioned and a number of questions about exchanges. They talked a little bit about their investment structure, and what investors do and don’t have a claim to. This seems a lot like more fear about the pre-farm, and whether investors will exercise their option on the coin and trash the market. That feels unlikely to me and not a great investment strategy but worse things have happened in Crypto, so its worth keeping an eye on.
They touched a bit on documentation. Yes. This is a very serious lack in the Chia ecosystem as they get into the enterprise. There are a ton of controls, use cases, play books and detailed how-to guides that they need to get finished in order to get traction in operational technology business units at any enterprise I know. Basically if you don’t provide that to the Enterprise OT team they will need to do it themselves. So the end result is that they will choose a vendor who doesn’t make them do that. Make your documentation detailed and good, people.
Justin England, Sr Director of Devops at Chia, made an interesting point about how people with very large farms should be running a Timelord. I think I understand why, but its not super clear and they skated by it to another topic fairly quickly so I will be following up with him about that to see what the risks of not running one would be for someone with a multi-PB farm.
All in all, it was a good AMA. Not too information dense but with a lot of good news. This is a good team for doing these. I would like to see something from their professional services business unit too, as that group will be largely responsible for the success of Chia engagements like Atari and Asteroids going forward. And as we keep saying, utility is key to the price of XCH, so all of us farmers should pay a lot of attention to that part of the business.
