What I did last summer

I've been writing long emails, they disappear, I write them to gain a perspective on my own thoughts. But I think I've been annoying my bro, so I'm going to send him quick short emails from now on, limit the amount of characters to what's important, write the long story here if that's ok. I do computer stuff.

I've just finished with a small project running a Chiacoin farm. It is a place that has interesting times ahead of it.

"May you live in interesting times" is an expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. While seemingly a blessing, the expression is normally used ironically; life is better in "uninteresting times" of peace and tranquility than in "interesting" ones, which are usually times of trouble.

I got that from Max Igan 😀. I hope you understand where I'm coming from with this one.

Its cursed (we call that a design flaw)

I've had this ironic lilt in my mind since observing the main design flaw, and watching it come up in other areas because its a really weird one. The way the system is conceived has expectory limits that keep getting broken and we're only a few months in. what I mean is, every thing Bram (designer) said wouldn't happen did actually happen and those expectations are in the essence of the design moving forward.

The first time I noticed this anomoly was with the pooling of the farmers. you farm chiacoin not mine it. I'm not explaining Chiacoin here, just explainig something to myself with regard to software design, that I think my bro would read. Its just a conversation so don't take it too seriously like I'm a researcher and this is my blog. its just my opinion from what I think I know, and its worth writing down.

Before the pooling protocol was added to Chiacoin, a rogue pool was setup and all you had to do was share your private key with them and it worked. Many did give their keys, something like that is strange but previous to pooling the system was a lottery, each farmer having solo plots. as the network grew, users with smaller plots would pretty much stop earning anything and the time to win could increase to 2 years and beyond. So it sits there with nothing going on for a very long time, not very interesting for new users - the math in the system is beautiful, it does actually balance, you will get paid, bigger farms we're fine I guess, but it was time to pool as it was pretty much like solo mining bitcoin today. when the pooling protocol was added a good number of pooling websites started, but the big pool that was hogging the XCH did not go away. the farms needed to be replotted for the pooling to work, so it took time to catch up.

the (OG) pool at the top hpool.in is still there, I joined pool.space, xchpool, flexpool, 6 all together, I forget the other ones, but I did try to find one based in the UK, there was one I found, but the servers IP addresses were in The Netherlands. over time I replotted again to just 1 pool with pool.space - its a neat pool system in itself, very well maintained.

my 10 TBs of plots received a payout every 3 or 4 days. The ROI would have been 2 years on the hardware, I was planning more growth, but I'm too practically minded, I know not to get sucked in. besides, even though I have a good workstation, It was a great excuse to massively increase the harddisk capacity as I couldn't really justify it otherwise. I made the same descion when I bought 2 GPU's back in the day, I just use the motherboard graphics these days.

but XCH is $60. and some of the user base has made a decision to turn off some harddrives due to the cost of running the harddrives with increased electricity prices in some areas. when you think about it this is really weird, the price of chia had bottomed at the actual cost of running the hardware - much like BTC, you know its power usage is astronomical and the cost of mining a BTC is around the same price as a BTC. at least last time I checked it was. so there is not much value in running many small drives any more. smaller farms are being pruned out, even though there is now pooling.

the price stuff is also really weird

peaked at $5000

The coin was only released last year.

the popularity of it has not grown, the reddit is pretty tame but it kept me informed at least. price is suspicious.

and now we have dust storms, and deep discussion about TPS, layer 2 transactions, block size capping. all so interesting I bet to those pushing.

sorry but the excess blockchain disk access on my SSD has done it for me basicially. it is burning up my hardware for just $0.50 every few days and I have no interest in the accumulation game, I only managed about $30 anyway, it was moved to other stuff, just wanted to get a last chance at mining again, something I could generate a crypto flow with and run blockchain stuff. It worked, but it was pants, it doesn't fit into to what I'm working on and needs specific support. It is on very few exchanges, there is something weird about the shared protocol from Etherium that makes it incompatible, I won't do into the details but its cursed there as well. I've heard maybe Exodus wallet is going to support it or already does, which is good I suppose but farming is over for me and I can't run it on the workstation anymore, its not being integrated into anything by me so probably one last transaction and then del ★.★