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well the talk around the crypto town
still seems to be
chia tonight we're looking at how to
plot
and all the things you need to know when
it comes to plotting
i love it um we're actually going to be
showing you on screen
how to plot how to use delays and things
like that so stick around
first of all jeff can we hit a couple of
those questions really really quickly
that have come in this week yeah
absolutely
excellent so right off the hop elko
brand watched our q
a on chia volume one yeah and asks are
you saying that four terabytes for
plotting is a starting point
or is it four terabytes total oh okay so
i would say
four terabytes would be the very least
that i would have in my farm and that's
really to do with the fact that the
difficulty of chia
is exponentially growing and when i made
that statement it was in fact
down at about what about 150 difficulty
now in the past week we have surpassed a
thousand difficulty now you can figure
you know without even understanding what
that means you know that it's harder to
mine
or to farm chia at this point um so the
more
space that you have dedicated to your
farm the more likely you are to win a
chia coin
and uh if you have very little space
you're simply less likely to to win that
i think the the analogy that was
presented uh in one of our comments
is that it's like a lottery in a way
um and i said well yeah kind of
however what's different about chia coin
versus a lottery is that
when you buy a lottery ticket and then
they do the draw
somebody wins right right but with chia
coin
yeah somebody wins but you don't have to
throw away your ticket and buy another
one you still have your ticket
and that ticket is then a part of the
next draw and the next one and the next
one
so thinking about the size of your farm
basically think of those plots as your
lottery tickets in a way
not to call this gambling or anything
like that but um just to give it an
analogy that makes
a little bit of sense um the more plots
you have
it's like you've bought more lottery
tickets so what have you done if you've
got a hundred lottery tickets
you presumably have a more likely chance
of winning than the person who
has only one or two right and actually
this relates to a question we have from
ashrash
al-sabog and he says i want to ask you
about
cultivating chia coin okay i'm going to
start with 30 terabytes
will this be profitable after a month or
two will i even get
profits and what are your expectations
for the date of the pool
okay so that uh that's a loaded question
and there's two of them in there
well let's hit the pool one first okay
we know that as i've mentioned on the
q a in the past um they are working on
uh pool code right now now there are
some pools out there but understand that
those are like third parties that are
trying to get started up before it's
officially available and
we can't promise you that they're
legitimate and and some of them are
even asking for your private keys and
that to me is a big no no
so don't go there because it's just not
worth the risk so um
okay so first question is about uh i was
related with the
terabytes yeah so okay so he wants to
know profitability and
will he see you pay it in the next month
okay so again
not to not to put a gambling spin on
chia coin okay i don't want to do that
because it's not really what it is if
you're if you're just using what you
have
sure if you sink ten thousand dollars
into your chia farm
you're gambling okay we're not doing
that you're not doing that
um but using the analogy and taking it a
little bit
uh of a step further if you have 30
terabytes
you have enough space for x number of
lottery tickets or chia plots so you've
got
room for a lot well let's find out how
many so we're going to go to chia
calculator.com and okay so you said 30
terabytes so first of all in google i'm
going to go 30
terabytes in tebabytes
which is 27 type of bytes
so we'll enter 27 into the calculator
oh and it changed it be mindful of that
okay so that's going to give me 273
plots so like 273 chances to win
at every time that the draw happens so
right now
as i'm recording this video the the
expected time to win us five months
that is completely arbitrary throw it
out the window are you gonna win some
chia coin
no go into this expecting absolutely not
okay that's if you're going into it
expecting to win chia coin then that's
the gambling mindset
we're not you it says that you might
get chia coin in five months it might be
two years
it might be five years uh it's really
just the luck of the draw
so um i would just go into it expecting
no you're not going to get anything
however the chance is with 273 plots or
30 terabytes you could get a chia
chia coin or chia block which is two
coins uh in
about five months but it's arbitrary
that's not a guarantee that's not a
promise
that's not and and as i say it's
exponentially getting more
more and more difficult so uh just three
weeks ago
that might have said two months right
right so if you
plot all that right now and you have all
those 273 plots done
um tomorrow it's going to be it's going
to say
six months yeah right because it's going
that's the way it goes
yep now with the five months and again
that's
kind of like you said an arbitrary
estimate because
we saw within the first week of chia
coming out yeah
somebody had plotted and the expectation
was a couple of months
and they won two chia coin within 24
hours luck of the draw and everybody was
like god darn you
you know and it just it absolutely was
that luck of the draw yeah
so well it's like i say again an analogy
but
you could have one lottery ticket and
win and the next guy who has 10 000
lottery tickets and blew their life
savings on
lottery tickets will not win and it's
completely
you have no idea right but you can look
at odds and say well if i have x number
then the odds are i'm going to win once
every year
right well it's still arbitrary and it's
still just a guesstimate
now is that because i mean as i'm
looking at your screen i'm seeing what
the total capacity of the chia network
is
yeah it gets bigger and bigger and then
what your hard drive capacity is
compared to that so in this case
you put in uh 27 tippabytes and you've
got point
zero zero zero two percent of the
network
sure and so yes yeah and so
if the the idea is that you have point
zero zero zero
zero two percent of the network and x
amount of chia
coin are being released every so many
minutes
that based on that mathematic algorithm
this is
how long it would approximately take but
again there's that luck of the draw so
if you're trying to figure that out uh
ashref
look at the total network size compared
to what you're putting forward
uh with your hard drive space and then
go oh okay well i've got
this percentage it's ever changing and
you keep saying jeff
hard drive space hard drive space hard
drive space is irrelevant no i get that
number of plots because you could have
100 terabytes with one plug
but but you're because it takes time to
plot if you don't have a good plotter
you're going to take months and months
to plot that
so if that's the case and we know that
there's exponential difficulty growth
by the time you've plotted 100 terabytes
it's too late
right you've missed the boat well and i
mean case in point for myself like i've
been plotting chia now
for three weeks non-stop
uh now it started off with really slow
process over usb with an nvme before my
um my pci card came in okay
now that i'm running uh two nvmes on
over pcie
cards i'm getting a lot faster plotting
price much faster with nvme
yes but i am now up to i
think it was like 62 plots okay in the
last three weeks it's really grown in
the last week and a half
but it's taken me that long to get there
and so if you're talking what was it 100
and
we're using 30 terabytes for for this
example but
i'm saying like if you think you're
going to plot 100 terabytes and start
getting chia like there's it's going to
take a while unless you've got a massive
system
which still yes that's not that's not
who we are we're not
we're not building that system right
because you would have to have
multiple nvmes and multiple uh so it's
just getting crazy so i i think that's
all the time that we have for
questions if we can move on uh because i
wanted to show you how to plot because
that is the most important thing
to get you going with chia now we talk
about using nvmes why
well you've seen videos that say oh you
can plot on a standard spinning drive
don't worry about it don't get an nvme
you can plot on a standard ssd
ignore those people okay because i'm not
telling you
it's impossible the statement is not
it's not
possible to do this you can take your
bicycle on the highway but you're not
going to do 120 kilometers an hour
great analogy well it's the truth so
like don't don't get sidetracked by
people saying oh you can do it
no listen to people who understand the
technology behind it and
and you're you're gonna want nvme
because it is
significantly faster at plotting and the
key thing
is you need to get your drives plotted
as quickly as possible
otherwise you've got a couple of plots
and a whole bunch of empty space
and that empty space is doing nothing
for you it will do nothing
for you until it's plotted all right so
remember that
so let's get into the plotting process
jeff i'm sure you've noticed plotting
can be
a little bit of a mathematical precision
you've got to kind of figure things
out right you got to figure out what
your system is capable of so
understand that if you're plotting on
nvme and you over saturate
the uh the nvme bus which means
it can't handle that amount of speed
then it's going to basically be like
maxing it out and it's going to slow
down the process so we don't want to do
that
right we want to try to find out what is
the sweet spot
for our system and no calculator is
going to tell you that you have to
figure that out and the easiest way to
figure that out i think jeff
is to simply run a single plot yes and
that's going to show you
it's going to give you a chance to
benchmark things on your system
so first thing i'm going to do is uh
bring up my chia blockchain software you
can see i've got 119 plots so far
zero uh block rewards get used to that
folks
one day our day will come okay so under
plots we're gonna go add a plot and i'm
just gonna go okay k32 is the default
yes
plot count one uh and then show advanced
options i'm gonna just change this to
four gigs of ram and 4 threads because
that's what i'm targeting
i've got 64 gigs of ram and 16 threads
so
now my temporary location is my nvme
drive so this is our plotter so
i've called it plot nvme just to make it
easy to pick and then my
final destination is my third field
which is an 8 terabyte hard drive so i'm
just going to drop it in there so what
it's going to do is it's going to plot
on my q drive
and then it's going to move to my y
drive so then i'm going to create plot
and it's going to start plotting so on
windows 10
it's really easy to bring up your task
manager by right clicking on your
taskbar which i have on my left you
might have it on the bottom
click on task manager performance and
then click on that nvme drive the q
drive
and i can see as it's plotting here it's
sitting around 8
12 usage so that tells me i can
easily plot another 5 or so without
over saturating the bus of my nvme drive
right but i kind of want to stagger
those so that i don't also over saturate
my ram
or my cpu so i can see immediately that
that
is only using this much of my bus to do
a single plot
so i can easily um increase that by
adding more plots
so i can do that now and i'm going to
start staggering normally i wouldn't
start one immediately
but i want to show you how to actually
kind of delay them
which is kind of like scheduling so i'm
going to set my plot count to 10
and i'm going to plot in parallel and
you say well robbie on your
plot calculator at category 5 dot tv
on free tools under robbie's chia plot
calculator
if we punch in my 2 terabyte nvme and my
16 terabytes of farm space i've got 64
uh pardon me 64. what is this amd
um and 64 gigs of ram
this is my threads on my cpu and i nine
ninety nine hundred k
so i see by default with four threads in
use
i can get only four plots in parallel so
robbie how the heck are you doing ten
because we're going to use a delay so
that we're never
running more than four on
that nvme at a single time right because
we don't wanna
well you can run maybe five or six but
because once it's
far along uh in the process you're gonna
learn all this stuff as you go it's an
experiment
when you're far enough along in the
process you can it shrinks it down
so you're no longer taking up as much
space and it's going to start working on
the other things and move them over
so the first time you run that one
not only do you need to know the bus
saturation but you need to know
how long it takes so honestly let it
finish but
watch it like check in every half hour
and see how far along it is
and record the time that it is when it
gets to about 40 or 50 percent would be
like a really safe cushion zone you
could do 30 to 40
that's fine i think it's between 32 and
39
uh percent where it it switches from
nvme to doing ram and cpu
but you know i like just playing it say
40 to 50
so i know that that's going to take
about 120 minutes to get there
so that's where i want my delay to be so
that it's going to start plotting
and then it's going to wait two hours
then it's going to start plotting the
next one and it's going to wait two
hours it's gonna start plotting the next
one
i could probably even do 90 minutes with
my system because of the speed that i
see on that bus
so i can do that i can say okay delay 90
minutes and you're gonna figure that out
from that one plot that you ran the
first time
remember i'm i'm proceeding just for the
sake of the video but
i i've already run that and i know how
long it takes to plot a single
plot of chia so so i'm going to set that
to 90 minutes delay
i'm going to set this to four gigs and
i'm gonna set this to four threads
and then i'm gonna set the same drive
for my plotting
and the same destination for my farm
field three field one and two is already
full there we go
so we're gonna do uh 10 plots but we're
going to delay each one so it's going to
start one right now so i'm going to have
two running because i've already started
one
and it's going to wait an hour and a
half then it's going to trigger the next
one and it's going to wait an
hour and a half and it's going to
trigger the next so by the time it gets
to the third plot
in my 10 it's already almost finished
the first one that i started
so we've got that kind of overlap
happening and then it's going to move
those off of my plotter
and onto the farm so this is the first
one that i started
you can see it's already at one percent
this one here is the first one in the
kind of um schedule so after 90 minutes
it's going to trigger this one 90
minutes later
this one so that's just going to go and
go jeff and
inevitably uh probably by tomorrow
morning i'm going to have those 10 plots
which is amazing so you're on that
kind of math you're able to get 30 plus
plots a day
i can actually show you that um so if i
bring up my plot uh
my farm so let's uh let's do that
so i told you i'm working on farm number
three right now
uh field three there it is
so we can just pick a date where i know
that i had it running
so here's the first of june
and you can see first first first first
so this is my plotter running
and i got let's see
i'm just going to highlight all those i
got 16 that day
okay on the 31st
i got 14. so no not quite 30
okay doesn't look like but still doing
pretty well
yeah so 16. all right and see
my system at home i'm averaging about 10
to 12 a day yeah it's a slightly slower
processor than yours and so that impacts
it
and i again i'm being very conservative
i'm you are i'm avoiding
any kind of crisis situation where i run
out of space on my nvme and it can't
move
the plots or can't create them yeah i'm
avoiding all that by just being really
like playing it safe you could speed
that up if you were to meticulously
figure out
where is the proper time i'm arbitrarily
saying 90 minutes approximately
uh i think i've been plotting at 120.
right so
you know i this is going to be faster
than what i've been doing in the past
right
but keep in mind if you start using your
computer for regular everyday stuff
it's going to impact your speed that's
why i've been kind of
playing it safe so if you know say
you're going away for the weekend
and you're not using your computer
maximize your plot that's a 30 plot day
that's right and make it happen but if
you're using your computer throughout
the day pull it back
you got to you got to vary that based on
your usage otherwise your system is
going to drag slow and i will i
will mention when i first started i am i
am vme on a usb
ew it was not good no
do not do nvme through a usb well it's
not truly nvme then is it
no it's simply usb so i ended up putting
it like i said on a
pcie one riser you've got yours on pci4
x4 x4 yeah so mine is not running
at full capacity for that nvme similarly
because i don't have that
spots on my hard drive yeah or my
motherboard i mean just looking at the
usb thing because some people are
probably thinking oh well
you know usb with uas is going to give
me up to
you know five gigabits a second if it's
usb 3.
yeah but remember see i'm moving really
really fast here but gigabits
per second right remember that the
measurements are different so when you
look at the speed of an nvme drive
at 2 000 megabytes
per second and you think that you're oh
well i've got a
five gigabit usb well five gigabits is
only 620 something
megabytes yep right so it's a completely
different measurement you got to convert
that
same reason i'm converting from
terabytes to tebibytes
right because it's not the same
measurement even if it has a similar
acronym so that's all the time that we
have remember
uh plotting is very complex i understand
that jeff understands that
but we're pretty far along in our
understanding on how it works and how to
maximize the performance of our plotter
and we're going to be looking at farming
as well on a raspberry pi
moving our plots over to a raspberry pi
farm
so hey if you've got questions for us of
things that we've covered up to this
point
please comment below if your question is
about something that we have
not covered and make sure you check out
our videos on our channel linux tech
show on youtube
um if we haven't covered it hey ask it
and it might make it into the next q a
so thank you so much for watching and
good luck with your chia farming
take it easy everybody bye
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you