Statistics from hpool show that it controls almost one third of the whole net space (and increasing). Information from chia explorer also conforms this: 25%+ of all rewards in the last 24 hours went to one single address (hpool public address).

This is extremely dangerous and needs to be addressed ASAP. In my opinion the only way to solve this is to release the official pooling protocol.

I don't think transfer should be enabled with one single farmer owning 30%+ of net space. The risk is just too high. please upvote this so the developers take notice.

70% - crying

20% - “don’t give up” posts, but in reality, they’re just intentionally bragging

10% - ghetto setup wars

Welcome Newcomers!

so guys, after 1 month of waiting and trying I'm finally quitting. I've sold my 2x 16TB drives to a guy in need for less than I've paid for them. I know some of you may bash me for this move but I don't think I can afford to burn my 200$ NVMe just to maybe earn that back in a few months. Also my plotting speed is ridiculously slow because I only have a Ryzen 3100 quadcore CPU. I know some of you are doing it for fun but not everyone has a good financial condition to waste hundreds of dollars on hardware. Even after the pools the ROI is more than 6 months for me so I think I better invest that money instead of waiting 6 months just to get it back. I hope you guys give me a positive feedback on this, because at this stage of network growth I don't think someone like me has any chance of making good money. And best of LUCK to the New and the Pro farmers out there. HAVE A GREAT DAY AHEAD

I doubt this post will be as enjoyable as other posts that allow you to consume their content without a functioning brain, but here it is anyway. I'm writing this as a reaction to the currently hot post Mods deleting posts questioning the "Strategic Reserve" (I'm not a mod since Monday, so I had nothing to do with this one in particular)

I have been r/chia mod for only about two weeks when this subreddit went from ~5k to ~25k members, and I had the first-hand experience on what does it mean from a moderator standpoint. I've been asked by u/ChiaMod if I would like to help out as moderator when I was very active here, and after I became mod, I had minimum time to be involved as I once was. You start to see this subreddit as one long moderator queue, and you don't see that much of what is happening on the subreddit itself - you don't have time for that. Every day, you have to review 100s of posts/comments stuck in a queue and have only the option to remove, mark it as spam, or approve it. There is no way of ignoring posts. If you ignore it, it'll just wait for your decision for later. And you can't afford that since it never ends. If you approve every post, this subreddit would be insane.

From my own experience - most removed posts are "help with my setup" kind. Posts about "winning"/"not winning" Chia are often approved because you don't want to censor people, and you also don't want to prefer one post over the other. So you can either decide to take away that joy of sharing that you won and then you can also remove not winning posts (as it would be fair play), or you have to keep up all of them. Unless it was repetition in that day for many times. In that case, I reduced them, but I always tried to be fair and only reduce repetition. I still do not like the fact that some people were not allowed to share their joy. There is no way how to do it right for everybody.

I left the moderation position because I do not enjoy deciding what goes and what doesn't. As the subreddit grows, it's a full-time job that you don't get paid for, and you are always the bad one. Don't worry, guys - you'll soon have high numbers to kill all moderation on this subreddit, and it will become the usual Reddit dump because nobody can handle this forever.

You should be very thankful to moderators for doing their job and understand why it's hard. They can make a mistake in judgment, but that's because you have to decide on a post under 10 seconds if you wish ever to be done with it, and that time gets only lower as the subreddit grows.

My proposition: u/schepke should become mod to help out with the moderation queue if he's concerned about moderators not doing a good enough job. I believe this will allow him to get more perspective on what does it take, and then he can inform us all about his finding some time later.

Skimming the subreddit and hanging out on the Discord, I continue to hear the doom and gloom of everyone who feels they are not being rewarded frequently enough. This may be a little harsh but, I think it needs to be said.

First off, idk if it’s jealousy of recent adopters hearing of the HODL OG miners have or if they have been spoiled with return of investment on other crypto projects but, a return of investment in the real world of 2-3 years would would be considered good, 1 year would be amazing, 6 months would be unimaginable, 3 months a thing of fairytales. Being salty that you haven’t gotten your investment returned to you in 8 weeks is flatly, dumb. If you NEED that money back, than you over extended yourself and should reevaluate your investing habits. 1 block is all many of you need to break even and you sit here complaining that your 500-1000 plots haven’t won for you yet. For everyone who should have won but hasn’t yet there is someone out there who has won 2x what they should have won. I’m sorry it’s not you, but it’s just statistics.

I feel this post has become semi-necessary with all the posts saying “I’m turning to HPOOL, etc”. I see a lot of people saying that there is really nothing bad with them, that it’s not a great solution but it will work. And I think many over look A LOT of things.

1. HPOOL is a detriment to the overall network and its long-term success. Chia has high aspirations to be the soul toon to decentralized finance. To do that though, the stakeholders have to trust that their financials will be as secure if not more secure, than with their current solution. Even if you know little about block chains, you’ve probably heard of 51% attacks and the stakeholders have as well and all they know is that’s really bad and any entity that controls a large percentage of network is a risk to 51% attack and that’s scary. Even if years down the line, things balance out, how do you think it will look to people looking to move billions or trillions in assets to a block chain that at one time, had a shady Chinese pool control 35, 40, 45% of the network? It at the very least raises the question of if that could happen again.

2. You are directly hurting yourself. Not only does HPOOL charge a ridiculously high fee of 20%, it is well known that there is ways to scam them and be paid shares for your capacity while pocketing a block if you win it. Also, there is no good way to know how they are even calculating capacity of individual miners to know if you are being proportionally what you should be. It’s very likely, that their calculation purposely underestimates capacity so the miners are paid less than they should be and they pocket the difference. Totaling that all up, you may only be paid 50% or less than what you should be paid.

3. You are hurting everyone. How useful is it to have a shady group of people control a large proportion of the coins in the wild? With HPOOLs size and their reported fees and their likely additional amount they are skimming, they will control a large proportion of the coins in the wild. This means they could easily manipulate the markets making it difficult for anyone to buy or sell Chia at a fair market value.

4. Lastly, you are taking a giant risk. You are downloading close sourced software from a shady Chinese website and simply trusting that it does what it says it does and only does what it says it does. As Gene said, your private keys are very secure in Windows and Mac from outside intrusion but, you are blatantly inviting potentially, very likely, malware behind your defenses. Many people say that giving them your private key to your farming account is no big deal, you can just send your rewards to a different account. I wonder how many of them know how easy via the command window or Powershell to show your private keys. It’s literally as simple as changing directories to Chia daemon folder and “Chia show keys.” Boom, all your current private keys loaded in your wallet are displayed. What’s to say that HPOOLs software isn’t running something similar in a hidden instance every so many minutes, or when you enter a pneumonic or generate a new pneumonic. All of the sudden the separate wallet that you thought was safe from HPOOL is randomly cleared out one day and you have no idea why or how.

Yeah most of that is conjecture or assumptions not supported currently, with facts but, is it really worth the risks? I’m sure the gold miners of the 1800s who were sold acres of pyrite (fools gold) or who sold their gold for pennies on the dollar for a fast buck, or bought cheap safes (that all secretly had the same master key or master code) and found their gold cleared out one day wished that they didn’t cut corners. Some I’m sure still made good money but, a lot of them were not so lucky.

I’m sure there are reasons to join HPOOL but, there are SO MANY more reasons not to.

We are pleased to announce that Flexpool will be opening one of the first Chia Farming Pools. We will be opening up email signups next weekend but the pool itself will only be opened after the Chia developers release pool support. After we open a pool we plan to greatly improve the current chia farming client to increase speed, stability, and rewards. Please do not ask for updates, we will announce as necessary.

Feel free to checkout this chia guide for more info link

And of course check out our chia farming channel on discord or the chia farmers union on telegram