You keep the plots on the HDDs forever. Meaning, the number of total actively stored plots connected to the Chia network is the proof of space. If you delete a plot and replace it with a new plot, your contributions and odds of farming a block don't increase at all. So once all of your HDD capacity has been plotted, you stop doing new plots and just sit and wait. Or alternatively, buy more storage to hold more plots.
But as noted in the article, the returns for buying more storage for Chia have dropped substantially. For a $200 10TB HDD, it would take at least 10 months to break even, and that's just on the HDD. If you build out a whole Chia farm with something like 500TB of total storage, you'd probably need to spend close to $20,000 (give or take), which would take 20 months at current rates just to break even.
Thank you so much for answering my questions Jared.
Thank you as well for the advice about ROI at current prices.
I just want to say I very much appreciate all the work, research and everything you do for the Hardware Enthusiast community.
I am 41 years old and have been building PC's for 25 years. I started reading Tom's Hardware when it was first started. Tom's has always been one of the first websites I check about any new hardware and in general on a daily basis.
I used to hate miners for the GPU price increases. I've been an Enthusiast for a long time. I used to work at a local PC sales store when I was in university and I bought a $700 GPU. The owner was my close friend's father. When I bought
that GPU he looked at his son and said "He's what they call an Enthusiast". That was in the 90's so 6 months later the GPU wasn't worth half what I paid for it. I swore I'd never pay that much for a GPU again.
I am currently on my 4th dual GPU setup, with 2 x 3090's. I started mining with the first 3090 I bought 2 weeks after they were released. Although I didn't start mining with it until Feb. I kick myself for not starting as soon as I got it. I used the profit so far to buy my second 3090 and everything I needed to setup my first full custom watercooling setup. I had a dual GPU setup in 2012/13 when I first found out about Bitcoin, probably from Tom's. I setup everything up for mining and using crypto and starting mining with both GPU's. At the time Bitcoin was about $12 and I didn't mine for much longer than a day or two. I kick myself for not sticking with it at time. I could be retired now if I had more foresight.
People that want to take out their anger about crypto on you and Tom's are just angry, immature, ill-informed and rude.
They want to talk about people disappearing with 2 billion dollars? Can they be that hypocritical or do they not remember or understand what happened to the world in 2008? More than 2 trillion dollars in wealth disappeared.
If anyone ACTUALLY wants to tackle issues with money laundering, crime etc, looking at crypto is the wrong place to start. Let's talk about how close to HALF the wealth in the world is hidden in tax haven countries.
Let's talk about the whole industry that has spawned, full of bankers, accountants and lawyers, to serve the super rich and create these tax havens, shell companies and tax avoidance/evasion schemes.
Let's talk about how the US is printing themselves into destruction. How every single fiat currency in the history of the world has failed.
People complain about the electricity. Whether people agree or not crypto has created billions or more in wealth all around the world. A lot of large industries that create a lot of money use huge amounts of electricity.
Think about how much electricity a steel mill with it's huge electric furnaces consumes. Any type of metal mill, or metal smelters. Ship building, oil and gas, chip fabs and the list goes on and on.
They just quote large number of watts consumed by crypto but don't ever put it into context with other major industries.
An average land drilling rig burns 20,000-30,000 litres of diesel fuel per day. Large container ships, that move most of the products in everyone's house, can burn >20,000 litres of diesel per hour. The largest container ships hold >4,000,000 gallons or about 15,000,000 litres of diesel.
It's not just drug dealers and sex criminals that use crypto. In fact, at this time I would say those users are in the minority by a large margin.
Thank you again for all your hard work. There are MANY of us that very much appreciate all that you have done for our community.
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