{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Cryptocurrencies Posts - Jongleberry", "home_page_url": "https://jongleberry.com/tags/cryptocurrencies", "feed_url": "https://jongleberry.com/tags/cryptocurrencies/feed.json", "description": "Articles about cryptocurrencies", "author": { "name": "Jonathan Ong", "url": "https://jongleberry.com" }, "items": [ { "id": "https://jongleberry.com/posts/three-months-farming-chia-on-hpool", "content_html": "

Around June 2021, I was talking to my boss about how I was decommissioning my NAS and that I was going to sell my HDs.\nHe then told me that I shouldn’t sell them because HD prices have increased due to Chia.\nInstead of selling my HDs, I decided to use my HDs to mine Chia as a hobby side-project.

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The Setup

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I had four WD 8TB WD Red Plus hard-drives that I bought for about $200 MSRP.\nDuring this time, the market price of these HDs had increased to about $300 MSRP.\nI had two Apple Mac minis - one M1 Mac mini that I use as my daily driver and an older quad-core Mac mini that I use headlessly various things like Pi-hole, Plex, and self-hosted GitHub Actions runners.\nEach had a T5/T7 Samsung external SSD HD as I was planning on relying on these instead of my NAS with spinning HDs.

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Because I sold my NAS prior, the only equipment I needed was a RAID enclosure.\nMost of the Thunderbolt 3 enclosures were about $500 MSRP, which was above what I was willing to spend.\nEventually, I realized that I don’t need Thunderbolt 3 and settled for the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad enclosure that only supported USB 3 and was $200 MSRP.\nI did purchase SoftRAID and set up RAID 5 on these HDs, creating a volume with about 24GB usable space.\nThis was a mistake - I didn’t need to RAID these HDs because it doesn’t really matter if I lose these files - I could just re-plot them.\nAdditionally, I’d rather have a 32GB volume and have 33% more plots.

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Plotting

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It took about one month to plot the full 24GB volume with both of my Mac minis.\nTo avoid thrashing my HDs, I plotted on my external Samsung drives.\nDuring plotting, I was still able to use my Mac mini M1 for work as long as I didn’t plot more than once.\nAlso, my electricity bill did not increase significantly - most of my bill is still from my HVAC unit.

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Income & ROI

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With 215 plots, I earn about 0.0045 Chia a day or about 0.135 Chia a month.\nAssuming Chia’s market price is $200 per XCH, this is about $27 per month using very little electricity.

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\"Chia

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At $27/month, this will take about 9 months to pay back my external RAID enclosure.\nIt will take even longer to pay back my HDs, but this is extra money to me since I don’t know how to sell HDs.\nThe ROI hopefully increases as Chia’s value increase.

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Pools

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When the official Chia pools were released, I started converting my old plots to new pool-enabled plots.\nHowever, this became too much work for me, so I stopped at 20 plots.\nWith these 20 plots, I’ve earned 0.01 Chia over 2 months!\nA whopping $2!

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\"Chia

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Future

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I don’t plan to buy any more HDs to mine Chia yet.\nHowever, I do plan to buy a gaming PC, but I’m not sure whether I’d mine any cryptocurrencies with it since my marginal electricity cost is about $0.24 per KW, which makes a lot of crypto mining unprofitable.

\n", "url": "https://jongleberry.com/posts/three-months-farming-chia-on-hpool", "title": "Three months farming Chia on HPOOL", "summary": "How my spare HDs allowed me to earn extra income", "date_modified": "2021-09-11T00:00:00.000Z", "date_published": "2021-09-11T00:00:00.000Z", "author": { "name": "Jonathan Ong", "url": "https://jongleberry.com" }, "tags": [ "cryptocurrencies" ] } ] }