We’ve seen this discussion come up often recently. Lots of concerns from “small” farmers that whales and large data centers won’t leave an opportunity to farm any Chia. Before we look into the numbers, let’s understand what you are doing when you farm Chia with a Proof of Space and Time.
When you plot a hard drive, those plots are yours forever and are capable of farming Chia for at least the next 5-10 years. Plots are plots are plots. There is no better GPU or faster ASIC in Chia. Each plot on the network has the same chance to win as a plot found in a large data center. The percentage of your plotted space dedicated to the total netspace is your chance of winning each block reward.
Now let’s look at some numbers. I am sorry that statistics class was about 15 years and I’ve somehow misplaced my textbook. This won’t be a completely accurate model especially with the total Netspace growing daily, but I want to give you an idea of how farming Chia is possible even with a modest farming setup.
For the first 3 years, there are 4608 block rewards per day worth 2 XCH each. That gives us 9216 XCH available to farm each day.
Compare this to the Bitcoin block reward schedule of 144/day and there are significantly more chances to win XCH on any given day.
Below is a chart that shows your expected block rewards per day over the “long-run”. Each block reward is 2 XCH.
These numbers may look small. However, consider your farmer isn’t (really) doing anything to check your plots and your bingo tickets are eligible to win each block. A block reward will eventually come your way.
Your individual block rewards are incredibly high variance on any given day. We can look at a poisson distribution to give you an idea of the expected range of rewards.
Here is a link to the spreadsheet if you want to download a copy and punch in your own numbers. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ikmDhdh16e3Oi37ldVBqoaizA7X7VRtd39W3abfNnr0/edit#gid=1730862245
Example 1:
You have a hard drive with 7.27 TiB of plots. In this instance we assume the average netspace over a 10 day window is 150 PiB. You will have an 89% chance of winning at least 1 block reward in that time frame and nearly a 20% chance of winning 4 or more blocks.
Example 2:
You have a 1.81 TiB drive on an average netspace of 200 PiB over 30 days. (Starting Netspace of 100 PiB and growing to 300 PiB over the next 30 days)
In this case you will have a 71% chance of winning at least 1 block reward/2 XCH and a 35% chance of winning 4 or more XCH in 30 days. Now we aren’t comfortable making price predictions here but your 2 TB of likely over-provisioned space has a great chance of providing a significant ROI on something that would otherwise site idle.
Once pooling is formally introduced, I expect to cover it extensively and it will smooth these rewards out even more. With thousands of small farmers each supplying a few TB to the network, you’d expect to win XCH a lot more often but in much lower denominations.
Happy farming!
I think the link to the spreadsheet is missing – did you mean this one: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ikmDhdh16e3Oi37ldVBqoaizA7X7VRtd39W3abfNnr0 ?
Thanks! Thought I had it in there.