I bought a farm on Saturday

Bitcoin Talk and Cryptocurrencies
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I recently commented on “anyone farming Chia” thread. I ran a proof of concept on a 10 year old PC for mining Chia, then followed that quickly with a pilot on a newer but low specification computer. I reached a milestone of 100 plots and was rewarded twice with 0.02 Chia each period. About $10 in all. But I have bought sufficient hardware to take the number of plots from 100 to 800, and (if things remain static, which they will not) that would give me a pilot target income of about $80 per month.

Return on capital is just about at the far end of my range of expectation. But to create the plots will take me about 100 days unless I invest in a faster PC, and that would blow my budget for the pilot.

So I found someone who was selling a whole setup that already had 1,000 plots created on an array of disks totalling 110TB. And that is generating about £150 per month reward share (in Chia, of course, not in fiat currency).

So I negotiated with the seller, and am now the proud owner of a 1,000 plot farm, and a machine that can add more plots at about 22 per day plotting capacity. Now my 700 additional plots can be created in 31 days not 100+ days.

It will probably take me a week to settle the system down, but basically I wanted a machine that could produce about 20 plots per day, and that has been achieved. The pilot indicated that ROIC was in the acceptable range and the purchase of an existing farm has slightly improved that ROIC.

The expectation in the short term is that this investment will generate around £200 to £250 per month in Chia tokens, with a farm about 200TB in size.

The pilot is now in Phase 3 and will be extended to the end of 2021 at which time a far more accurate ROIC will be available.

I will shortly decide on whether to run a Helium pilot with the same method of strategy and plan that I applied to Chia pilot. One bonus is that I needed to open a gate.io account, which if I am not mistaken achieves two more future objectives. One is that I can continue to trade sh**coins on this exchange, and the other is that it has features for leveraged account to trade cryptos. Just waiting for KYC confirmation to get going.

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Excited for you Mondeoman! :blush: Hahaha. Honestly, when I read the title of the post, I thought you bought an actual farm to stay at and raise livestock in. :sweat_smile: But I’m equally excited for this! :smiley: I’m just a bit surprised cause I don’t think you have talked about Chia much in the past. :open_mouth: Or maybe, I just missed those posts of yours. :thinking: Why choose this coin in particular? :blush: But still, good luuuuck! I hope you update us. :blush:

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Hi @ria-rose,
Thanks for the positive support. In this modern world, I think the title is referred to as “click bait”.

First, why did I even think about producing an income stream from mining (or in this case plotting?). Because I wanted to diversify our Crypto investments into three components - longer term investment, short term trading (why I participate in BabyPips forum), and medium term “mining”.

The business case for mining has very broad parameters, and is not an easy thing to put in a box. But I have tried. Basically aligned with the rest of our business affairs, I depreciate any equipment or R&D costs over five years much like any other business. Then after that linear depreciation deduction I look for investments (with our without my personal time involvement) that have a good chance of returning 40% per year after tax. The Chia plotting pilot was chosen as the first of four potential proof of concept and pilot schemes I will run in the next twelve months to “suck it and see” when it comes to mining. The medium term goal is to generate an income stream of only up to around £5,000 per year with a net cash investment of less than £25,000. So the goals and timeframe are set in stone, all I have to do is make some business decisions along the way.

I chose Chia after analyzing the methodology choice used by each of the most popular tokens to assure that the cryptography is going to be able to prevent a 51% attack. In the case of Chia the whitepaper refers to “proof of time and space”, and if for no other reasons sounds to me like Einstein, the Tardis and Star Trek all rolled into one. Who am I to question the sages?

Looking at the rising complaints from naysayers that “Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as Argentina”, I decided not to go with the flow in a saturated market, where CPU power has become a poor second to graphics card cryptography calculations, which themselves are a poor substitute for an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). There are some other background reasons related to my work experience of the past ten years that made it relatively easy to conclude that Chia was a natural as the first PoC and pilot. I started on 26Jul21 with five milestones. Plot 1 Chia, 10 Chia, 100 Chia - make sure I am actually being rewarded for plotting, 1,000 Chia, 10,000 Chia.

Buying the farm has given me a 100 day acceleration of the plan, and the opportunity came along just the same day that I had been paid my first reward that allowed me to be sure of my empirical calculations of reward distribution per plot created. Looking at a published leaderboard that shows the top 100 earners in my chosen pool also aligned well with my expectations.

So what is the Return on invested capital likely to be? You have to have a very broad range of acceptance here. On the downside, Chia could fall to zero. It is already 85% down on its ATH of early May 2021. Exit strategy would be to sell the PCs and the hard drives with an estimated loss of 20% of funds expended (or keep the kit to repurpose it). After all I am an IT geek.

On the upside, the target is a time to payback of 18 months after depreciation of equipment. The downside is limited to 20% loss of funds expended. The upside is unlimited. At the most optimistic level, Chia could return to its ATH of $1,600 per token, at a point the time to payback is then around 3 months. LOL - a ten bagger. :rofl:

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Excellent news.

Where is @enickma to share in your joys? Can you tell me, was the “setup” on the cloud or physical computers that you’re taking possession of?

I will say, XCH has moved some 40% up over the last month. It’s nowhere near May highs, but you’re moving in the right direction!

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No cloud. Too much vapourware in there. It is on a physical server PC about five months old, and on 10 external consumer grade Western Digital and Seagate backup hard drives. Not difficult to liquidate at a decent price on eBay if it all goes pear shaped. Or I could have a new hobby playing with virtual machines and automating the home and the other resident family members :joy:

So the value bought is in the hardware itself, and an estimated £500 of Chia earnings in the next three months from the existing 1,030 plots. I consider I paid “fair value” for the hardware that equates approximately to the new cost of all components before system integration and labour. So I got the plots “for free”. That is my business case.

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Not a bad deal! I’ll cross my fingers that XCH makes it move back to May highs. Wishing you a performant future.

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Hey all! Great to see some other farmers! Sorry I have not been on much lately. Everything got really busy on me.

I still just have 2 XCH earned, but I’m up to almost 450 plots! Soon it’ll be time to double the capacity!

Cheers!

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Wow that’s a great investment. I’m looking forward to have a farm too someday. I want to have goats and horses too!

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Well done on the plots. I only have 140 consistently farming. I have decided to separate the plotting and farming functions. I first moved farming to an older PC that is stable and behaving itself. But for many reasons, I have now decided to move farming to a Raspberry PI based system and just received my Pi 400 for the first production system. I will initially power it from an old PC ATX power supply but will soon move it to a 12V only battery-powered solution. The Pi runs off just over 3W. This will scale out to between 10 and 20 external drives with an estimated overall power requirement of less than 200W. I may connect that up to a solar power array. But before all that I need to confirm the Chia currency incoming. It keeps me off the street. Target is £100 per month with current equipment but may expand that out to £200 per month with an incremental cost of about 60% of the initial system cost. Happy days.

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Super impressed with your technical know-how and actual implementations!

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I was JUST about to buy a 400 for the same reason, and I read something about the SD card storage not being fast enough. Let us know how this goes, please.

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I will do. I expect I will have confirmation of farming within the week.

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Hi,
I am just an old engineer who discovered crypto currencies last May. I don’t know why it took me so long but it did. This year has been a bit of a sea change for me. I had two operations in January and March and needed some rest afterwards. I have been in IT consulting for over 20 years but my actual work has become far less about technical architecture or design management and a lot more about people management. In June, after watching Voskcoin on Youtube (you have to admire his determination, passion and sheer hard work, and his beautiful Shiba Inu dog, tail) I decided to determine whether mining would be a useful pursuit. So I cleared out my outside workshop and repurposed it as an electronics / computer mancave. It is over 200 square feet, so plenty of room to host geeky stuff like open frame PCs and externally mounted hard disks.

I’ve just bought all the electrical bits to build two farming rigs - the raspberry pi rig will be based on the external hard drives, and the conventional PC rig will be based on stack mounted internal hard drives. I’m buying 2GB and 4GB drives like they are going out of fashion and will gradually upgrade to larger drives. I may entertain some SAS drives with an enterprise server type set up but I suspect I will have enough on my plate building and managing a plotter and two farmers. I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge, and I did want to do some serious command line interface stuff (cmd, powershell, linux, industrial control interfacing and Google or AWS web stuff) and I am gaining exposure to a lot of that skill set I lost over 20 years ago. LIving the dream :rofl: Until it all catches fire and goes up in smoke. :face_vomiting:

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You’ve got me thinking about putting to use all these SATA HDs I have laying around gathering dust. Nowhere near 110 TBs.

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Hi,
All the rest of the electrical bits arrived today to build the first production unit. Barrel connectors, 12V cables, 1 to 10 USB 3.0 extender, 3A automotive fuses, fuse break out boxes to host up to 20 external hard drives to host the “open bench” farming unit to be hosted on the Raspberry Pi 400.

I also bought a second hand Amazon Fire tablet (Kindle) and followed a fairly lengthy Youtube video of how to convert it to a vanilla flavour of Android tablet. With a video capture cable ordered yesterday that will do as my “local HDMI monitor” for the RPI400. I intend to build it in “headless mode” meaning a remote ssh network connection so it will not require a keyboard, monitor or mouse. I thought of procuring a KVM switch, but that was so 20th century. Looking forward to a couple of hobby weekends playing in the mancave. :rofl:

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Reminded me of this - from my favourite guru in “dodgy” electronics repair and adaptions ! :slightly_smiling_face:

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That takes me back a lot longer than 20 years. I was doing this stuff at Uni, and if we had had access to gurus doing dodgy electronics in those days, I am sure I would have learned a lot more than I did. I had a fascination for bridge and pool (even snooker) so electronics took second place for my attention at the time. When I was 16 I repaired some dodgy electrical cabling in my parents house they had just moved in to, and had to pull up the boards in the third bedroom above the kitchen to access the wiring in the ceiling. Just before I reinstated power at the fuse box I announced “Another genius achievement” only to be met with a loud crack and a puff of smoke as the fuse blew. They were pieces of wire in those days and to “change a fuse” meant uncoiling a small length of appropriately rated fuse wire off a cardboard holder and wrapping it around between the terminals of the fuse holder. Happy days. That taught me a little humility when in the company of potentially lethal AC voltage. Like the chemistry experiments of two years previous, I lived to fight another day. I must have been blessed.

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For some odd reason this has me thinking of Man United’s new kit sponsor, TeamViewer. Wow, their advertising is working!

Very cool to follow along with this project.

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Took some time out to create a database of inventory of hard drives since the number is increasing rapidly. A 6TB external arrived today and 2 x 3TB internals arrived yesterday. In total I have three active machines (all PC) and am building the RPI kit.

Teamviewer. I had something to do with that (and 120 other apps) in my last assignment. I can’t remember whether this was one that was being deprecated because it didn’t encrypt data end to end (doubt that) or whether it was another one called "Team(somethingelse). I should take a look at the product again.