Ok, for those thinking about getting into this...don't.
It is HORRIBLY unprofitable.
I have optimized 11TB worth of plots running on a Xeon Processor via internal SATA3.
I have made about ten cents in 24 hours.
Here are the problems as I see it:
- Low Coin Value
- Pools are Designed to Heavily Favor those with larger plot farms. let me explain. In the GPU farming world, if you supply 1% of the hashes, you get 1% of the returns, minus any fees. In this Proof of Capacity world, typically the person that finds the solution gets half the reward or so. Fine, whatever, that is proportional to work and fair, but the rest of it is weighted by a formula that depends on your best "deadline" found among your plots. If your best deadline is below some pool set threshold, you will not get credit for ANY work during that block. Many if not most pools have this limit set fairly low, say 30 or 90 days. With my 11 TB, I would be above this threshold MOST of the time. However, someone with more Terabytes plotted will be much more likely to have something that qualifies.
- Power Cost - assuming your mining rig uses 150W, it will take your first 8-10TB just to pay power costs for the month unless the PC was already going to be on.
I was smart enough to start on a pool that has a max deadline of a year, but it is still very unprofitable. I would make considerably more just turning on CPU mining on my pc.
I cannot recommend this unless you can start with a very large number of Terabytes.
If someone has some numbers that prove me wrong, I will gladly listen, but for now, this is a farce.
