we're back to answer more of your chia
cryptocurrency questions
jeff we're gonna jump right back into it
we ran out of time last time
but uh you've got more questions for me
let's do it somebody says i'm trying to
do my first plots
but i don't understand what all the
settings mean i've tried doing just 10
plots and it said i don't have enough
space on my drive but it's two terabytes
and this goes back to the storage space
that we're talking about earlier uh
the nvme space for the uh yeah the
temporary so they're saying it's two
terabytes
and i read somewhere that shia plots are
only about 100 gigs each
so i'm lost why is it that i can't do 10
ah interesting okay i'm going to bring
up my screen here okay
what this user is encountering is
they're adding a plot and they see it's
101 gigabytes they're seeing it as
but that's actually give a gibabytes
which is hard for me to say but it is a
word
um and they're setting this to 10. so
thinking that okay 101 times 10 is going
to be about a terabyte
and they have a 2 terabyte nvme so it
should work if they plot that in
parallel right
uh well uh now note that this is give
giveabytes not gigabytes okay and the
temporary space required
per plot is
gigabytes so a quick way to figure this
out i'm going to go into google
and say 239 gigabytes
to gigabytes that is going to be 256
gigabytes per plot and
we're doing 10 plots at once so that
requires
2566.24
gigabytes uh convert that to terabytes
and that requires a 2.6 terabyte drive
so you're actually exceeding
the capacity of your nvme right there so
when you're when you're setting up your
plots
um you need to keep that in mind now we
actually have a
very helpful calculator for you if you
go on to our website category5.tv
this is going to help you out viewer on
our website click on
free tools up at the top and then we're
going to scroll down to cryptocurrency
and click on robbie's chia plot
calculator
and in the calculator we're going to say
okay now you mentioned you've got a two
terabyte
nvme drive um and let's say my farm
capacity is eight terabytes and we've
got
eight threads on our i9 cpu and we've
uh 64 gigs of ram okay i can see that i
can do
two plots and selecting parallel and i
can use
3.7 uh well 3780
i don't know how to say that megabytes
[Laughter]
so well you say well two is not enough
robbie i want to do more than two so
notice that this is set the mode is set
to performance which is going to give us
fewer plots per run but it's going to be
faster well if i want to maximize my
output i can go with the most number of
plots per run
and the slowest and that's going to give
me 7 on your 2 terabyte
okay so follow those settings and you'll
be able to actually maximize
how much you're able to do but you
notice that 10 it's nowhere near 10 it's
seven is the absolute maximum
that you're able to do right okay now as
far as the performance versus
maximum capacity is there a sweet spot
in that
like it's hard to calculate yourself
right because you're going to be doing a
lot of testing
so under use of computer in our
calculator you can change it to
balanced so that you can still use your
computer system for example
which basically relieved it of one plot
so that's going to give us a couple of
well one
thread on our cpu and a couple gigs of
ram uh or i can go with low resource
usage which is going to allow me to run
it in the background
and i can keep working on my computer
it's only going to plot three plots at a
time but it's going to be able to find
that sweet spot for us
okay that's just a helpful tool this is
not the de facto tool that's going to
answer all your questions and get you
plotting perfectly
it's just a helpful tool to get you
started and it should be able to help
to to get your head around some of those
settings sure
absolutely because those settings do
matter you don't just randomly punch in
a number
yeah i don't know if anybody who's done
mining i'm just going to put in a random
number
it just doesn't work yeah now when it
comes to mining cryptocurrency there's
been a lot of
talk about some of the some of the coins
and the environmental impact now
chia says that they are environmentally
friendly they do say this jeff
but there are some on youtube that's
saying that that's hogwash
and it's actually just as bad
environmentally as some of the more
well-known cryptocurrencies
right so is that true is it
environmentally friendly because my
thought is
if you can do it on a single board
computer that's so much less on energy
pull
i think the statement jeff um that i
have heard
about some people saying that it's just
as bad as proof of work or it is proof
of work
they are looking at the plotting process
so we again backing up to our first
question
understanding the difference between
plotting and farming
so the plotting process well
when you're watching these videos or
learning these things reading tutorials
and things
understand that if the person that
you're observing
is setting up petabytes of storage and
they
are creating a plotter that has 200 mvme
drives and they're all set up in a raid
like they are that is they're
more than a farm like they are like a
factory farm okay
so understand that now what we're doing
is completely different because
understand that the proof-of-work aspect
of
chia is just the plotting process
if you want to call it proof of work
it's not technically
but it is you know that's the time
component and it does use cpu
and and uh i o and ram not gpu
so if they say it's not environmentally
friendly
they are referring and when we say
environmentally friendly we're talking
about like energy consumption
heat generated all that kind of stuff
it's not like it it doesn't spew things
into the atmosphere right
but just like crypto you know the proof
of work cryptos like bitcoin
um that's they're referring to the
plotting process
in our scale so we're we've got a hard
drive connected to a raspberry pi that
we're going to farm on
we are plotting until that hard drive is
full
on our farm once that hard drive has as
many plots as it can take
and our calculator will tell you so your
your 8 terabyte drive can take
75 plots okay so once i've created 75
plots on that drive
i stopped plotting i'm done now
for as long as that raspberry pi and the
hard drive
will live without failing they will just
run and run and run farming chia
how much usage is there in that process
now what do we have jeff we have a
raspberry pi
micro computer and we have an external
right that is this the usage
which is negligible yep it's just that
initial
plotting process so thinking about
traditional mining you're going to be
mining mining mining all the time 24 7
for the end of
until the end of time this is a process
that happens once
you move those onto your farm and then
the farm is extremely
economical it's not going to be running
up your hydro bill
your electricity bill we call it hydro
here in canada um
and and it's extremely uh by contrast
to proof of work extremely good
comparatively for the environment
right so i mean if you're doing a an
analysis
in a you know say 24 hour period between
asic mining groups versus plotting
you might say oh there's it's not that
negligible but if you look at the grand
scheme of
you know you do your plotting and say
your hard drives run for three years
yeah and you balance that all out it's
like it's not even
close keep in mind a consumer hard drive
is gonna have a five year warranty on it
and it's meant to run for five years
consecutively exactly so
you know you're you could get five years
out of that and beyond
that's right so it's just gonna run
using nothing which is
amazing so okay now somebody has
we must be getting through the list we
are we're getting we're getting right
near the end thank you so much for your
questions folks post your comments below
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love it yeah all right yeah we got a
couple i think easy questions oh good
because now we've gone through the setup
process we're mined yeah yeah
all right we're getting ready to start
mining farming sorry
um what wallet should they use
because oh okay she is like i don't have
yeah
you're not putting it on your
traditional wallet um it's part of the
chia blockchain software right now
now will it be adopted by um by other
wallet software
probably uh yeah i would expect so
keep in mind that chia is open source
and you know that's
that's likely going to happen but right
now it's very very new
so there's not third party integration i
i don't know of any
um any uh exchanges that are currently
carrying it
etc etc and the wallet is going to be
the chia blockchain software right okay
um and as far as
you know the investment cost because
you've talked about mvmes and
you know you're going to burn one of
those out in the hard drive space one at
least
yeah is there kind of a sweet spot
between
investment versus potential profit
there's there's a big fine line between
investing
and just simply farming chia
i would suggest i mean if you're just
the average joe consumer like me
just grab some stuff that you got
kicking around
you might have to buy an nvme drive i
happen to have
a two terabyte nvme drive that i can
burn through and that's okay
uh if you don't you might have to buy
that but
uh and a little bit extra hardware just
use what you have
um jeff you were asking about like how
big of a hard drive should i have and
and i think if you've got a four
terabyte hard drive kicking around
which most of us do at this point maybe
you can pull it from something
um you'd probably be okay to start with
that you could start with a one terabyte
and you're going to plot it
and let it run on your farm and then
upgrade it or add another one and
you can continually kind of grow it that
way but don't go
sinking a bunch of money into something
that hasn't generated anything for you
yet
okay build yourself and there's there's
a flip side to that because
early adopters you know the early bird
gets the worm and that's absolutely true
with something like chia because
the more people who start farming it the
harder it will be to get chia
and so you know the early adopters are
the ones who are going to get
the chia coin really really quickly so
there's a flip side to it too
if you can pull up some extra storage
and you know hook it up then that's
great but
but there's a fine line between
setting up a farm and gambling and i
would say
as soon as you cross over that line or
even approach that line
uh back up okay that just use what you
have
and and that's the sweet spot to get
started
and if you have to put a little bit of
hardware into it then
by all means do but just keep it within
reason and watch out
you know don't look at that calculator
and say wow i'm going to get 600 a month
on my raspberry pi
well then you've got to factor in that
you're going to actually need to buy
four nvme drives because you're going to
burn through them in order to create
that many plots
so you you know you've got to be careful
of that so
start small work your way there and
then you can start to increase that as
you grow
okay makes sense um now if i decided
you know i've been mining chia for three
years farming
farming sorry i've got to get used to
this farming yes say i've been farming
chia
for a couple of years now and and i've
but it's only been out for a week well
yeah but i decide that yeah
i'm done and i want to and i finished
i'm finished maybe it's gotten so
complex that you can no longer get chia
right so can i um
repurpose those hard drives for
something else can i use them for a
different cryptocurrency or
is the whole thing like once it's
plotted that's it you're done the only
thing you're burning through is the nvme
so you probably won't want to reuse that
nvme drive you'll want to use that for
plotting until it dies
as far as your farming hardware goes
yeah absolutely repurpose that hard
drive
use it as an external backup drive for
your computer whatever you want to do
use it as extra storage put it in a raid
array
yeah absolutely we reuse it it's just a
hard drive okay
well those are all kind of the top
questions and i think it kind of covers
the gamut from
getting started to well shutting her
down
here we are yeah we're going to be
looking at chia over the course of the
next little while as it grows
and uh we are going to be doing some
features such as uh farming on a
raspberry pi microcomputer
um so you don't want to miss out on
those features make sure you give us a
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subscribe so that you get those
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blah blah blah you've heard it said um
you know how it works so
thank you so much for joining us
everyone and thank you so much for your
questions do post yours below
if we haven't covered what you're
wondering about with chia and we'd be
happy to field those for you take care
everybody see ya
bye
[Music]
you