#30. Empowering Individuals with Producer Economy.

Prepare to be catapulted into the future of digital autonomy as we navigate the intricate world of high-performance computing. Joined by the insightful Digital Spaceport, we venture beyond the familiar terrain of cloud computing, questioning the delicate balance between convenience and control. This discussion peels back the layers of data sovereignty, envisaging a distributed cloud powered by the very people who use it. We'll capture the essence of what it means to be a producer in the homegrown cryptocurrency realm, and how it's shaping the future of our digital infrastructures.

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Digital spaceport social media.
Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/c/digitalspaceport
Twitter : https://twitter.com/gospaceport
Website : https://digitalspaceport.com/

Transcript

DSP: 0:09
One of the biggest things that we see, as there's a convergence that's been going on for 10 plus years now towards the cloud as being the cost saver for a lot of enterprises, the ramifications of that are now very visible, and so you have hyper centralization of control. That is a negative to society, in my estimation, and so when you're looking at high performance compute moving closer and closer to the cloud, when you're looking at GPUs in the cloud being one of the latest things with companies like Lambda, you start to see that there's a centralization aspect of what data you would even be able to process. So do you want to be able to process high performance amounts of data for, say, a cryptocurrency? Well, a lot of these actually have restrictions that say you cannot engage in any cryptocurrency activities whatsoever on their servers. So there are just so many catches to the cloud ecosystem because it is literally not your own infrastructure, and with that comes the lack of sovereignty over your data, and that's one of the most important things that people have as we move into an increasingly technical age, and I am very much a proponent of where we're going being something that could be good if we are, if we're careful about how we produce it if we're careful about how we tread into it, and we don't see that a lot of people are moving in this direction as far as enterprises, but I don't expect them to be the people leading the charge here. I expect it to be home producers of cryptocurrencies that have a basis in Web 3, like we see with so many product services that you can now get that are basically built around the ability to be a docker host or a VPN host or a next cloud host and you'd be able to rent that out as a service through a distributed cloud of people that are individuals out there in the ecosystem that are not cloud providers, and there's certainly redundancy that's built into many of these more advanced systems and that could empower a future that not only is rewarding to the individuals producing the cryptocurrencies, the home producers of those cryptocurrencies but also rewards society by having a better kind of exposure to the information sets that are uncensored or would not be viable to create in the cloud. So those are some things that I think are coming down the pipeline in Web 3. I know Web 3 has a lot of connotations to people. I push back hard on its JPEG monkeys and NFTs. I don't agree that that is Web 3. Web 3 is so much more than that.

Host: 3:00
Welcome, digital hey. How are you?

DSP: 3:03
doing today? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing wonderful, fantastic. As we are almost towards the peak point of summer and heading towards fall, fall is my probably favorite time of the year.

Host: 3:16
Awesome and you know I follow Digital. He is very informative His folks who haven't checked him out. He's on YouTube, he's everywhere All his information about the hardware, how to farm Chia and other stuff, all the goodies. So I'm very pleased to have him today and take it away, Distal.

DSP: 3:39
Yeah, so I just kind of became a YouTube content creator not long ago. You can find me youtubecom, forward slash at digital spaceport. You can also find me at Twitter and that's at go spaceport and so, yeah, I have kind of a systems background. I've been working with high performance compute for a while. In my house I've built a miniature garage data center three racks deep. It's been a really fun journey. It's been really interesting. Also, a lot of technical challenges, a lot of advancements are happening in the crypto space around what is being produced, what is coming out the other side of Web 3. So being the producers of those cryptocurrencies has become a lot more technically challenging and certainly we see things like Chia, which definitely we're both very invested in the Chia ecosystem, being one of the forefront leaders in that charge, with just tons of engineering going on. It's very much like a high performance compute kind of system that they've got set up here and there's a lot of very, very difficult things that I try to learn and then explain that to people and, as clear a case as possible, try to give people you know this is how you can do this for these things, for like GPU plotting and stuff like that, which is one of the newest revolutions that we have in the Chia ecosystem.

Host: 5:02
I want to step back a little and just talk about what does it mean to you high performance computing in today's day and age, when people are kind of moving to the cloud? Where do you see its future and the role an individual like yourself and others play in that ecosystem?

DSP: 5:23
So that's a great question, and I think one of the biggest things that we see, as there's a convergence that's been going on for 10 plus years now towards the cloud as being the cost saver for a lot of enterprises that the ramifications of that are now very visible, and so you have hypercentralization of control. That is a net negative to society, in my estimation, and so when you're looking at high performance compute moving closer and closer to the cloud, when you're looking at GPUs in the cloud being one of the latest things with companies like Lambda, you start to see that there's a centralization aspect of what data you would even be able to process. So do you want to be able to process high performance amounts of data for, say, a cryptocurrency? Well, a lot of these actually have restrictions that say you cannot engage in any cryptocurrency activities whatsoever on their servers. So there are just so many catches to the cloud ecosystem because it is literally not your own infrastructure, and with that comes the lack of sovereignty over your data, and that's one of the most important things that people have as we move into an increasingly technical age, and I am very much a proponent of where we're going being something that could be good if we're careful about how we produce it, if we're careful about how we tread into it, and we don't see that a lot of people are moving in this direction as far as enterprises, but I don't expect them to be the people leading the charge here. I expect it to be home producers of cryptocurrencies that have a basis in Web3, like we see with so many product services that you can now get that are basically built around the ability to be a Docker host or a VPN host or a NextCloud host and you'd be able to rent that out as a service through a distributed cloud of people that are individuals out there in the ecosystem that are not cloud providers, and there's certainly redundancy that's built into many of these more advanced systems and that could empower a future that not only is rewarding to the individuals producing the cryptocurrencies, the home producers of those cryptocurrencies, but also rewards society by having a better kind of exposure to the information sets that are uncensored or would not be viable to create in the cloud. So those are some things that I think are coming down the pipeline in Web3. I know Web3 has a lot of connotations to people. I push back hard on its JPEG monkeys and NFTs. I don't agree that. That is Web3. Web3 is so much more than that. Web3 is the decentralized infrastructure to create, produce and consume content, without centralized points like we see in Web2, with mega creations like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit dominating the ecosystem and controlling the narrative and also the conversations that happen on them.

Host: 8:23
Wow, you've put it really beautifully, almost poetic terms. You know that I'm just trying to digest and absorb all of that and, yeah, so that's a unique perspective on where we are headed with high performance computing Now, right now, you see all the big cloud giants, right, google, google's of the world, microsoft, amazon's of the world, but then Web3 is much more to the people. You know, as you rightly said, like you could use your equipment at home to be a part of the network, right, we add security to the network, and not just with your work, but with your hardware you can basically contribute. And that, to me, is where we should be heading, rather than believing in this trust me bro model where we are giving our data away and all the information away out there in the cloud.

DSP: 9:23
Well, if you look at certain retailers, it's fascinating. If you look at, like, walmart, they have a very restrictive stance on where you can host your data interchange services if you're going to be a vendor for them, like they're not going to just allow somebody to put their services on, for instance, amazon, a primary competitor. Now is that paranoia on their part or is that accurate assessment of what's actually happening out there? I can only say that it's being prudent and the prudence that they show in doing that is something that the individual consumer, when they're creating a startup, when they're creating just even a website, they don't necessarily consider the implications of that, and I think that that's something that's going to become much more important to people, not just as a cost savings of Web3, because we do see traditional hosting service platforms come with cost premiums to them, which they rightly have expensive infrastructure and overhead for management but we see the individual being more and more empowered, smarter and smarter really is what it is. We see the individual actually being able to be their own system administrator in Web3 at a much higher level than we've seen in the past. It's certainly not a huge percentage. I'm not saying that 25% of the people out there understand how to be a system administrator and deploy KA clusters, but there are quite a few people out there that do understand how to set up their own website, how to push a couple of buttons on the Cache network, for instance, and deploy a WordPress host or rent out some GPUs for doing some processing on the latest LLMs. There's a lot of capabilities that people are understanding and growing into more and more and embracing and that's one of the things that I believe in as a core concept to try to help empower people, because crypto is even bigger than just cryptocurrency. It really is cryptocurrency, probably the financial rails of that independence, but when you look at the technology side of it, it's even bigger than just cryptocurrency and distributed ledger technology. It's literally the sovereignty of your data and the tie into the finance aspects of it is important, but also the tie into the capabilities aspects of it are probably even more important. And having things like the Permawave with our weave, or, like I mentioned, the distributed capabilities of setting up a website or a VPN with a cache, or the distributed technology of having data layer, which is a much more complicated solution set that doesn't have tons of engineering around it yet but I think is going to be a really good hash tree for validating what's happening in distributed sets out there and allowing people to be rewarded for hosting distributed sets. I think those things are. They're burgeoning technologies. They excite me very much and I think they will be the future.

Host: 12:03
Yeah, thanks for that. You know you mentioned an interesting thing that I want to kind of larp on to is the Amazon and all the big companies of the world. Like we feel like everything we can throw in the cloud and there is cost to that right. Like there is. I mean, I have people tell me and I've worked for corporates where they say, like you need to be a mathematician to figure out the bill of you know your Amazon web servers. Like, if you, if in a big organization you don't know how many instances you are running, and that sort of a thing and that cost can balloon really quickly. So we are seeing a lot of companies and rightly mentioned Walmart and others. They're going with this hybrid approach of like having something in house and then part of it in the cloud or completely.

DSP: 12:52
I think I think Walmart is mainly with Azure, I think micro they're with Microsoft and I think that's a competitive stance. I'm not saying that they're decentralized they should be pushing towards more decentralization but I believe they're with Azure specifically. But you see, like that is a stark difference in them allowing their vendors not to be on a certain competitor. There's some interesting things that are happening underneath the seat, behind the scenes there is is what I'm guessing.

Host: 13:18
All right, you know me and you both are chia phonetics. People should have figured, figured out by now. So what's the best part of chia farming, like what's the fun part for you for chia farming, and first of all, what's the size of your farm?

DSP: 13:34
So I have a compressed farm and the effective size is roughly three pibby bites, but the actual size is two pibby bites of raw space, and so I'm getting roughly about a 1.42 multiplier on my space by having a compressed, plotted farm. And so one of the best things, in my opinion, about a chia farm is the hardware, the technology and also the learning that goes into setting up these systems. It is it is a nerd's playground. It's a good kind of nerd's playground. I have increased my knowledge of storage base. Everything like NVMe over fiber is something that I was looking at today and I thought to myself I was like what was the last time that, what are the chances I would be looking at NVMe over fiber? Hit it not been for chia? When is the last time that I would ever consider something like that? So I mean it's really interesting when you look at the evolution of yourself, as in the past two years, I look at the evolution of myself and where I started and where I am now. I mean I started out around mainnet with like one server, one hypervised server and one storage server. Unrate was my powering back in for it. I had about 40 terabytes of free space. I actually did delete some family photos so that I would be able to put chia plots in their place, decision that I'm going to have to live with one of these days when people figure that out. Nobody's figured it out yet. I do have them backed up to a tape library, so they are on a tape library. Unfortunately, the tape library is encrypted and there are some surrounding issues with that, so that'll be an interesting solution. Is that the good thing about tape is I apparently have 30 years to figure this out. So I mean that's where I started and where I'm at today is. I mean I've got 1500 cores of CPUs in the house, I've got a fleet of GPUs for programming, I've got 40 gigabit networking, I've got actually a sponsor that is FScom that supplies a lot of cables and stuff, and like would I have expected to have been here? No, absolutely not. And I mean I now have 100 gigabit switch in the mail to me. So like the things that are changing in my life as a result of this are bettering me as far as a Linux system administrator and as far as my understanding of deploying complex architectures and more complex things that I can communicate to people that they may not understand how to set up things like VLANs, things like distributed storage, things like NFS shares. Those things are value ads when I can educate people on their use because it actually makes them better at their own tasks. And I have even people in the audience that have gotten jobs in system administration, that they got kind of their start with me and then they started tinkering hard, took some classes and got a junior admin role. So it's a good feeling whenever you're able to see those kind of impacts and I want to grow that particular part of the channel more and more as I continue doing things the education aspects of it.

Host: 16:36
That's great to hear because you know, I, through this channel, I want to promote this educational aspect that you're talking about to. You know, folks in India who are just going through their engineering schools and getting out and then, you know, decide to work for, say, big company and, you know, hit a click, a button and you have a Kubernetes instance in the cloud. But then they got to know this background knowledge of setting things up, you know, you know getting into, as some have skin in the game, you know that sort of a thing and gets their hands dirty. And then it's also the fun of it. When I hear you you talking about stuff in the videos, I feel like you have that sense of like joy about doing this right and which these days, I think, as a complete engineer myself, being an engineer, coming from that background, I wish I had initially, you know, had that sort of hey, it's not just bookish knowledge. I build some stuff here and like learn by doing stuff and not just blockchain stuff, like real networking stuff, that that lays the foundation and infrastructure stuff that is obviously required for blockchain as well.

DSP: 17:46
Yeah, understanding the core components down to the like, by levels that are relevant, are important for people, and when we look at the OSI model, a lot of people kind of homogenize their interest group at wherever their specialty lies and they don't go outside that, and I think that a good knowledge, like, of the entirety of the stack is pretty relevant to most people. Do I understand exactly how you accomplish certain computer science tasks? Absolutely not, but do I think that it's important for me to be able to try to learn those when they're relevant or when I can see that they're exposed to what I'm doing? Absolutely, and YouTube is a great vehicle for being able to do that. I would love to see Twitter X, whatever it is. I'd love to see that turn into that kind of a platform also that had more video and longer form video. It's totally not there yet, but again, we're talking about traditional Web 2 platforms and I'm already working with some people on some actual Web 3 video services that are going to be pretty interesting. So I think that there is going to be a pretty big shift as far as where you see the content distribution and the reward and enrichment, not just for content creators but also for consumers of that content in the near term future. So I'm working with some very talented people and I can't say who and I can't say what and I can't say when. That's the most important part. But I can say this I'm a stickler for good delivery and if the deliverable is not really ready then it won't ship. But there is some very talented people in the Chia ecosystem that have been working on some video content distribution systems that are underlying and underpinned by the technology itself and there will be some content that is produced around that if not a large majority of the content potentially, that is produced about that. So I think there is going to be a really nice inflection point. I mean, I am basically the beta partner for this particular company that's moving forward with this, but there will probably be a really, really cool launch for it and I'm like I said, I'm a stickler for making sure that it's a good launch and not giving away any secret sauce up ahead of time. But there is stuff coming down the pipeline in this and I hope to see it actually this year.Host: 20:05
That is great to hear. You know I do follow your channel, so I know you're you're stickler for perfection and it's almost appellish, like in terms of delivery, like you really focus on certain things and you're really good at it, and so I think that sort of focus is required in in Web three, right when we ship products, deliver products like this, this thing just does one thing and does it really good. And, and sometimes Web three is just a lot of things to a lot of people and so it's like too much noise, like any other. You know Web two and before that even.

DSP: 20:40
And shipping bad products is. So if you're a YouTube content creator, there's like an expeditiousness that you need to have for shipping videos, and that is basically feeding the algorithm, because the algorithm does punish you if you don't have a content cadence that is to its liking. So one of the bigger things that I've been focused on is, of course, when is the official chia software for compressed plotting coming out? And we just got the RC to release today and I was running through it. I was super excited to test it out. I installed it on a test machine and unfortunately, I built it in a plotter didn't work for me. I can't say it's 100% a bug yet, but they are checking into whether it's a bug on their end.

Host: 21:26
My apologies. I also interrupted you for this interview. I'm like hey digital, I want an interview right now. So you were probably working on that.

DSP: 21:34
So one of the. I was not, so I don't have tight relationships with any crypto company is kind of a policy. I have like loose relationships with crypto companies but I don't want to like, I don't want to influence them, I don't want them to influence me, I don't want to be a crypto influencer. Does that make sense? I don't look highly upon most of the people in the ecosystem who are actually crypto shells and there are a lot of them. It's a huge problem in the ecosystem. People have major vested interests that they don't disclose and, as a result of that, individuals buy into things or buy into ideas or buy into chains and there's big problems that can manifest. I mean it for literally the tech, and if I don't like your tech, I'm not doing it. I love Chia's tech, but I don't like coordinate releases of videos or anything like that with them. So I literally found the RC two thing because it was like it just happened and I was like I was on GitHub. I spent a fair amount of time crawling around GitHub but I was on GitHub. I saw it pop up and I was like, ooh, new release. So I had no idea that it was going to be today, because actually they're released interviewed with our interview. That's what really happened.

Host: 22:43
Yeah, rightly put. I mean I saw your tweet about it and I kind of looked at the GitHub repost shared a screenshot that looks exciting. I mean I look forward to making faster plots and although my form is off right now, and but yeah, wait, wait, wait.

DSP: 23:01
Why is your farm off? Let's talk about that. Oh, I am moving.

Host: 23:04
So it's like I was talking to Josh. There's another common friend in in Shia community so he had his farm off. So because I was doing some move stuff and so yeah, I had to turn it off for a bit and you know I have a pretty humble form here. But yeah, it'll be turned on. It'll be turned on like end of the end of today, Don't worry.

DSP: 23:27
One of my favorite things about Shia farming is the future that we're going to see, with low power things like SSDs becoming more and more prevalent and the the capability to run a blockchain off of solar. Is that's this distributed. It's actually technically possible, it's just it's very, very difficult to do right now, but it's going to become significantly less difficult to do in the near term. I've been working on a project for a long time to get a stable Shia farmer up and running for overnight periods of time, and I was relying on some technology initially that did not have the capabilities of doing it, but I've since moved over to an incredibly cost-effective little laptop, something I would actually term a crap top. This thing is a horrible laptop. It was like the worst laptop I've ever had. But you know what it can do pretty well have really good battery life to augment the offset battery life of a solar generator and power panel, and literally you can go overnight because of that, because it's got two essentially battery backups and the ability to do that is something I was not able to do with independent systems that did not have built-in battery backups. But there is a video that I've been working on for oh my gosh, I think over a year, and it is finally going to be worked, working and functional soon. And I mean the entire solar battery thing cost me like $55. The laptop cost me like at 25 bucks Like that's a $75 full node that you can run on the Shia blockchain and it is completely off grid, asides from the fact that the Wi-Fi needs to be tied to, of course, your own internet services. So there's a lot of powers that we're gonna see with Chia that we don't see with other Valid consensus mechanisms out there, and certainly you've been in crypto for a while, so you understand a valid consensus mechanism and a Problematic consensus mechanism, and when you look at things like proof of stake, you've got a problematic consensus mechanism right there.

Host: 25:25
Definitely. You know, 75 bucks a solar powered. Oh my god, I, I want one, and what one of them.

DSP: 25:34
This is not going to be a for sale product. This is going to be a fun get home and it'll like show you how I did mine. But you know being able to source laptops and stuff like that out there that are cheap. These are well known to be like some of the. They're very low power. They're quad core, which is kind of one of the things you do need with Chia's quad core, but they're like the old Lenovo s 100s which are. They're. They're a horrible desktop laptop experience like you would not want this for your normal laptop, but if you, if you mess around with it and install Debian bookworm on it, which you can install on it, even though it's got like this really weird Thing where it's got a 32-bit bootloader but it runs 64 bit operating systems, could you need the 64 bit operating system, of course, for Chia, but you can. That 32 bit boot loader is kind of a problem, but Debian still supports that and thank God for Debian bookworm. In a world of red hat and canonical weirdness, we've got some real shining gems with people like Debian and the release of bookworm. I installed it on that, no Problem whatsoever, and it just booted up and it worked, which was great because so many other distributions would not boot, and so that's, of course, a problem you can't run into. But these things, because of that particular problem, they're for sale on the internet for super cheap because they ran like Windows 10 home 32 bit and like nobody wants it.Host: 26:58
I'm looking out for that video because once that video drops, I'm gonna replicate that. And then I'm gonna replicate that in India with all the folks that I'm connected over there because they need that.

DSP: 27:11
You know, I'm gonna replicate it like this new superconductor that's coming out see and this is one of the things that I love about Chia and I don't think people necessarily have a geographically sensitive perspective enough to the rest of the world. When you consider blockchain technologies and Having massive decentralization in your blockchain technology cannot become at the expense of exposure in places like Southeast Asia. And Chia is so different because, if we look at China probably the largest country out there for Chia independent full nodes by far and the ability to do things cheap, the ability to do things off grid is Incredibly important in so many different regions. If we look at Africa, if we look at South America, there are just a lot of places that can benefit wildly by having this kind of you know, easy, cheap access to things, and they probably even have solar batteries and solar panels like a 20 watt solar panel which a 20 watt solar panel is? It's like nothing. They probably have access to these things at really good prices also in their local, local markets. So there's a lot of possibilities to really getting hands on Chia, getting Chia into the world's hands through doing things like this that I am very motivated by, because that, in my opinion, is the great inroad that will actually lead Chia to what it needs to do to become one of the top five cryptos out there.

Host: 28:37
You know you again said it so nicely the Thing with India is there's so much pool of talent in India. So you know there are one of the biggest countries with the youngest population and when they can run something at cheap, that's what they're looking for. They want to be part of Decentralized world. But right now there the obstacles are, of course, with pricing and how they get their Knowledge transfer, all that sort of thing, and then the whole world of possibility opens up and then you know that that's the beauty of I was say Chia and Chia like blockchains. You know where you could run these things and be part of the network and you know really contribute towards this, this new world, in a way where you're building stuff, learning stuff, you know, contributing to the network, have this big giant family, world family, as to say.

DSP: 29:34
I said, new world financial order that does not depend upon the traditional world's financial order, and I think that is the challenge that is so pushed back against by the traditional finance people out there. They don't want that. The central banks don't want that. They don't want to have independent commerce between people that they have, you know, no control over it. They don't want that. That's what she enables and that is the power of blockchain technology. That got me into blockchains in the first place.

Host: 30:02
Point you mentioned is off-grid aspect of what. What you will be showcasing, and you know, in In my side of the world, like from where I come from, in summer time was one of the horrible times to have Electricity outages. You know, like right now, you see, in South Africa, I mean, it's getting better, definitely the infrastructure and everything. We, india has a Initiative putting the maximum number of nuclear plants, right now and then after I by, perhaps China it's getting better. But still that offline and you so touched it and nailed it. Actually we Every time somebody would ask me they're like oh, so can it work like in an offline, off, you know, off the electricity grid or whatever in that fashion, and I think she, yeah, like blockchains, and she has an answer for that. So I really psyched, honestly. This is so some of the scale and capabilities.

DSP: 31:00
So this is one of the biases that a lot of people when you talk about something like this, they're like that doesn't interest me and they're like thinking in like a Western mindset. Like what is $2 a day? What is a dollar a day? Like what is 50 cents a day? Like that's not, I'm not going to be like, oh my gosh, that's going to like change me or that's going to help me. That's not the case everywhere. Like there's a lot of places in the world that that's actually not insignificant and you can do that with not the latest and greatest hardware. That's why Chi also by not utilizing specialty hardware is so well engineered. You use off the shelf things. You can use low power hard drives, you can even use old hard drives. I mean you should optimize for your space efficiency, but you don't have to optimize for your space efficiency. So there's an option to keep your full node up and running with a really low end system and you can have a couple SSDs running off that same system or you could have possibly even one hard drive. You may run into situations where your hard drive would have to drop off for power consumption reasons, but the ability to have that earnings capacity during sunlight hours is still pretty good.

Host: 32:10
You know, I can imagine like a student in India, you know who's an engineering school, wants to earn extra pocket money and wants to learn about things. I mean they're winning blocks or like running this thing and that's that it and put it there. I think that would be something much worthwhile. As you said, that Western view, I mean that that means a lot to them, even in in villages. You know that that would mean a lot and since the consumption of it's not, you're running asics at home, right, you're spending like exorbitant amount of money and then hoping that you'll hit that one block.

DSP: 32:48
Yeah, three kilowatts is a lot for somebody to off grid. It's impossible, in my estimation, with current solar technology to come even close to off gridding asics that are like an S 19 or anything that would be viable on Bitcoin. It just that economics of it are impossible. When you look at something like chia, the economics of it are not impossible and I think that is that's an empowering thing right there.Host: 33:10
And I think it's perfect fit for, I would say, ascending countries, you know, like India, other parts of Africa, like I don't see them putting asics everywhere and expecting everybody to be contributing towards this decentralization. Anybody who wants to, you know, at a very low cost. That's the key.

DSP: 33:31
And we're talking about one of the crux parts of why we see hyper consolidation and like blockchains and what that does to decentralization and the impacts that have on the actual security and the exposure to governmental regulation. Literally, unless you are hyper decentralized hyper decentralized, you are at huge regulatory capture risks in places like the United States, places like Canada, places like Germany, places all over the world Are going to have that. Let's capture it if we can. If they don't have that view today, there's very likely a chance to have that view in the future. So, by having a massively decentralized network without any single point that has a hyper convergence of the actual hash rate, if you're looking at Bitcoin or net space, if you're looking at chia, then you're giving yourself security. You're giving yourself a mint security on your blockchain.

Host: 34:24
Yeah, you know to the point like there are not only 10 people running the blockchain, then you can. You know the government officials can go break their knee in kneecap or something and stop the chain.

DSP: 34:36
Yeah, Well, I mean, if somebody were to sue, for instance, ethereum's like kind of biggest mining operations that have the consolidated power, which are based in, you know, mainly the United States data centers, like I don't think it would be too hard because there's hyper centralization because of the way that staking was invented. If you look at the hyper convergence of actual blockchain technology for Bitcoin, you see the massive impacts that that has that are negative, because literally there's only mining pools for the option. You can't solo far. I mean, maybe you could if you were huge, but you really can't effectively solo on Bitcoin. It's crazy. So you have to go with a mining like far pool. There's huge risk in that. Now there are some design consideration changes that have been proffered and we hope I hope to see them actually happen in Bitcoin. But Bitcoin has a monolithic viewset as far as their developer base and they are not like let's change anything. For the most part, they are kind of our cake in a lot of their thought processes and I'm not saying that's necessarily bad in all instances, but when you're looking at the consensus formation of Chia, where blocks are formed on the individual basis at the actual machine, not in a pool, that is drastically different, and so you don't see that unless we see widespread adoption of stratum v2. We're not going to see that in Bitcoin, and so I mean the biggest challenges to actual stratum v2 adoption are going to be the very vested powers that are not going to want to see it like mining pools. So you've got this catch 22. It's very hard to see how you progress forward with decentralization in most of these instances, because who wants to make the decisions? Do you want to make the decision for something like Bitcoin or have a very, very vocal, prominent voice in the decision making process? The mining pools have a very prominent voice because they control if they're going to go with the fork. They control that. People in Chia may not quite understand how this traditionally works, yet A lot of people are new in Chia. When you adopt the software that's put out by an organization or a company, like we have the coming Chia hard fork this is a good education point right here. The installation and using of that software is what makes the consensus mechanism go bird and that is how you move the chain along. So when Chia has its hard fork coming up, where we're going to see the plot filter being reduced incrementally over time and some other changes about plots being able to pass the filter multiple times in a row. When you adopt that software, when you install that software, then you are moving forward and adopting the actual chains fork. That means that there will be a legacy chain possibly out there. Also, if there is somebody that's still running a Time Lord and they forgot about it, and I'm sure somebody's got some Chia farms in a closet that are still running 1.2.8 or something like that. So that's what you see and that's important in Chia, because there's 100,000 people making that decision. So that is not one person making the decision, that is not 50 people making the decision at a pool level. That is, hundreds of thousands of people making that decision individually. That is empowerment to the actual individual farmer, the individual participant in the blockchain out there. If you look at like Bitcoin, there's a couple of tools out there that mainly are going to decide what happens, and that's what is going to happen. So there is a huge difference and that, and, of course, the Nakamoto coefficient that is a resultant in that same stream, are important concepts for people to consider when they're thinking about the decentralization of a blockchain and the regulatory capture potentials of a blockchain.

Host: 38:16
That's an excellent point that I hadn't considered. That this is, it is giving power to the individuals, yet it's decentralized. Like you know, when we talk about consensus, well, there is a thing in consensus where there is, you know, death by committee, right people, a lot of people making decisions and things move slower. It's not even that here, like you own your own. In this case, you know you're the ownership relies on you, and it's not to the pool, Like in case of. You know, you mentioned about Bitcoin that that could definitely happens and is happening. Yeah, yeah. So switching gears, digital what do you see? Some of challenges to the Chia network as it currently stands.

DSP: 39:04
Great question. So in my estimation, one of the biggest challenges to the Chia network is probably the finance aspects of how they move forward, and this is a very off chance. But if they were not able to become a public company, a lot of what they built, kind of leading up to this point, is built around. That I can't say. You know that I think that there's any chance that they don't become a public company and go down this pathway that they've started. But what happens if that doesn't work out is a good question that you know Jean or somebody would be the best person to answer, but that is a good one. Right, there is what happens if that doesn't work out. I think that's a valid question. Second is is there a reliance on other blockchains not doing well or having been securities for Chia to advance? And I think that that's a dangerous ecosystem If that were to be the case, sometimes I almost feel like they need for others to have violated the securities laws, and I think the aspect that I'm looking at in US based politics is there is so much change that can happen in US politics based upon who's who's in power that we may see that actually, in this next election cycle become hey, you violated, even if they did violate laws. Crypto companies violated laws and I don't think there's any doubt that most of these crypto companies have actually probably traded illegal security or illegal securities. Is that going to get? Are they going to get a pass, is one of the big questions, because that could happen. Does that have a negative impact on Chia if that happens and those crypto companies get a pass? That's another valid question. I don't think it does, because I think that the actual underlying technology of Chia is actually very different and the actual distribution of Chia is very different and the eco friendliness of Chia is actually incredibly different. I think. Another good one, this one I want to get your viewpoint on also you're a farmer, you're a Chia farmer. I love, I love to ask this one to Chia farmers At what point do you think you are like hey, it's not, it's not making me enough, I'm not interested in it, because there is an inflection point for people that are in Chia and we have had, I would say, two full wave cycles of different types of Chia farmers that have come in. The first wave of Chia farmers that came in were like I bought two 16 terabyte hard drives and I'm not making $800 a month and I'm upset. These were some weird people to get into the space, but they did come into the space early on. They were hyper vocal. Actually they were some of the biggest spreaders of bud out there. Farewell to them, is you know, my take. They were unreasonable. They did a lot of damage to the Chia ecosystem as well by literally going on Reddit and nonstop flooding Chia early on. That was all they did. I'm I'm if you were there, if you saw it, you know and it was very disappointing to see that those people just a very small minority of people had that viewpoint that they should be getting rich quick and it didn't work out, because getting rich quick never does work out. However, long term stability of earnings on Chia are something that is very important. So one of the biggest threats that I see to Chia is, if there is a net space explosion that does not have a correlating price increase, what happens to the farmers out there? I think there would be a natural market force that will always be in effect, which is a churn cycle. Which people look at it? They look at their electric rates and they say it's not worth it for me. But if there is a wild 2X or something like that, that's an existential threat to actual farmers out there. Another very, very interesting one, this one I've thought about a lot in the context of data centers, not mega data centers. I don't see mega data centers ever getting involved with the Chia. Yeah. So I mean if we see a lot of mid-sized data centers come in with ability to rapidly spin up net space, then you can see a consolidation effect happen on Chia. If distributed farmers out there get discouraged and they're like, why am I involved in it? That's one of the things that I think could be a real world impact that I think that's probably the biggest risk that I see out there to Chia is if there are hyperscalers that get involved and they can spin up throughout a network of 10 or 20 or 30 of them, 20 exabytes or something like that, that would be really dangerous for Chia in my opinion, because then you're going to see a lot of people say, well, I'm making $15 a day, I'm out, and for somebody that doesn't have the electric rates that you're going to probably get, if you have a contracted power agreement, which most data centers are going to have, contracted power agreements most of these hyperscalers are going to have very favorable rates in their data center operations. So you could see that that would be a big impact. That one is probably the one that I would rate as the highest likelihood of happening, and so the balancing economics of that, the balancing macro picture of that, does indicate to me that we have to see some price action on Chia change, and that is one of the harder things for me to say. This will be the thing that changes it out there in the ecosystem. What are your thoughts on that?

Host: 44:28
Yes, that's a very, very interesting question and you put it very nicely and I was thinking well, for me personally and this is just my personal thing Initially, when I started with Shia, yes, I was like, okay, if this is going to be profitable, then I also had this back of my mind, to be part of this network. And then, you know, for altruistic reasons or whatever you want to say, I wanted to be part of this, learn this. You know what's happening. So that helped me a lot. Now, with this question, this is interesting because, moving forward, what if the price doesn't reflect, say, the increase in net space and what does that mean for miners? That's a very, very valid question For me personally. I enjoy interacting with you know other aspects of the chain. While chain, the full load is running. Now you have the NFTs right. I sometimes, you know, when I'm talking on these spaces with folks and I'm just interacting with them, I recently tried the clawback feature which was like, oh man, this is cool, like I want to try that, and so I keep it running on my system and it doesn't care, which you know. Sometimes I work on that system and sometimes it's just running. It's very low powered and now with plotting being, you've been able to do plots faster. I think that was kind of an hindrance earlier, where you'll be sitting there making plots and you're like, oh my God, that's taking so much electricity. Now, if you can spin up 100 TB in a day or two or like that, I think that will be helpful.

DSP: 46:02
Devops engineers are very good at what they do in these data centers and, like you said, the viability of CPU plotting being something that was going to be adopted by a data center were pretty slim in my opinion. When you look at like GPU plotting and the like 4x efficiency increase in the massive speedups that you get with it, it makes you know plotting something that may just be destroyed later and overwritten. Whenever there's extra you know need for that space very viable.

Host: 46:33
You're still trying to think through your question, like in the largest larger context, right. Like if that price action does not reflect, you know, what the farmers are sort of putting in, what are the contingencies, what are other plans, like how would that work? I mean, the best I can think of is a super low power consumption on this thing. That you just it's just working in the background. You know, yeah, the investment is going to be hard drives for sure, and now that trend is pretty good looking like in terms of price per TB, right, like you see, like what?

DSP: 47:11
like if we saw the price of chia at $50, do you think that we would see the price of hard drives at the price they are right now? That's a good question for you. Yeah, I haven't thought about it.

Host: 47:22
Yeah, I, that's an interesting question for sure. But yeah, I mean power consumption, consumption considerations and price of the hard drives themselves. If they go through, say tomorrow, one TB is what 20 bucks or less, I mean in US that would be pretty, pretty good. And how does it? What does it mean for countries outside of US? Yeah, that's probably a longer, much longer discussion.

DSP: 47:53
There's a whole economics discussion that is literally spitballing and like crystal balling and like I can guarantee you only one thing in that, and that is nobody would that makes a guess would come out correct, because it'll be something different, because I mean, that's predicting the future and it's impossible to do, but it is something that's interesting to think about. Like you know, if the price of chia went to $250 tomorrow, like, what would happen? Everybody would go running out of hard drives. Like then you would even be able to like would we have hard drive supply crunch? Part two Like there are things that are interesting out there that have happened in the past that I don't think chia themselves this is just my guess, but I don't think chia the company really wanted to cause a hard drive supply crisis in the greater ecosystem. But at the same time, these are free market forces that were in effect, we saw free market forces pretty much dictating what people did. I know that when chia like launched and you know I had my little farm after I got, you know the vast majority of it plotted I was driving around central Texas to Walmart's looking for eight and 12 and 16 terabyte USB drives. Like it was free market forces. People were like go to your Walmart's, you can find an eight terabyte drive that hasn't been marked up to insane yet. That was like the last vestige. So I mean, there was a lot of that that happened.

Host: 49:14
One possibility I was thinking while you were talking is so when price point for Bitcoin like that's the best parallel I can think of right now kind of didn't reflect the minor kind of profit in certain instances, that happened in the past and currently you did see somewhat of centralization of these mining companies right in in in bit in case of Bitcoin, like these top sort of companies having some somewhat of centralization happening. You know where people who were not profitable either they optimized or they made it more efficient, reduce their costs, whatnot? I was thinking in case of chia. Even if that happens, you're still looking at much more decentralization than in case of, say, Bitcoin, which is what lasted, lasted us 12 plus years right now. So I'm thinking in that way makes me less worried. But then we are talking also the order of magnitude of price. You know fluctuation, like if Bitcoin is 60 grand and you know, but you guys still at, like you know 50 years or hundreds. But it's an interesting question to consider.

DSP: 50:26
I mean, yeah, I mean it was like so there's a difficulty adjustment and I would say the difficulty to price adjustment that we've seen traditionally with chia is very common sense and irrational Like what we've seen. As far as the difficulty adjustments that kind of regulate how much you potentially could earn, and chia and the price of chia, they've been very rational, which is scary in one sense because crypto markets traditionally are super irrational, so we haven't usually seen that kind of trend in a lot, like you see higher hash rates than ever before and yet your earnings in Bitcoin are down hard. So like there's I mean there's that's irrational in my opinion. You did see a difficulty adjustment today, so people's earnings did go up at least for some period of time here today. But I mean, when you're looking at that, there is an irrationality that I would say is more normal to see in crypto markets than what we are seeing with chia, which is an incredibly rational and I think again, it just comes back to the difficulty of setting up chia farms and stuff has kind of prohibited like mass supermass adoption. It's not just like as easy as plug in an ASIC and go. For the most part, evergreen has changed that for I would say, a pretty good portion of the base of people out there that are newcomers that are getting out of GPUs. But I don't think that that is still even like to the level of how easy it is to set up an ASIC, which is literally like set it on a shelf, plug it into a thing and you're good to go. And GPU operations were usually pretty simple, also with high OS and stuff like that. For setting up mining operations she has traditionally been a little bit more technical and if there is like a problem and you're solo, good luck figuring it out. And I have known so many people that have had problems. They've gone solo, they have not figured out that they had problems until a long time and they've hurt their farming earnings quite substantially. So I do urge people, when you set up your farm, and probably periodically throughout, then your earnings will not probably be as high as if you were solo. But do consider it that it's one mistake away from you not making your earnings if you don't have the feedback mechanism that you get with being on a pool. So it's a good idea to just be on a pool, see those partials going through and knowing, hey, this is okay, wait for that. First block is my general like recommendation. Before you're like, this is a validated system and I can take it offline, go through the logs. Look at what the logs look like on a validated system. So you know, this is what it looks like when things are working.

Host: 53:04
Yeah, that's a good point also. So the pooling as it works and I'm pooling right now used to be a solo farmer and it rewards are consistent. So now I'm happy, I'm like, oh, I'm getting something in and maybe I should get more drives every now and then again. So that's the incentive. And your question kind of got me thinking. Suppose the price doesn't reflect that over time. Is there a world where, say, there is some consolidation happening between these multiple pools and then as a farmer, I can say, hey, you know what, I don't want to buy a lot of drives, but what if I could? Would there be a world where there will be a concept of a shared drive? Like you know, I hit a button with the pool and say, hey, for this much cost, I need this much drive space and my plots will sit there and whatever. So I try to offset that with the rewards that I earn, right, I mean, there could be that possibility, but I don't know.

DSP: 54:04
I think that actually has been done a couple of times out there. Shared pooling and stuff like that is, to my knowledge, like kind of rent. A plot has happened in the past. I don't necessarily I don't want to say the name of the company that's done it because there's been a lot of question marks around them, but there is one company that still does do that to my knowledge. They're in Europe, but there could be some interesting things as far as what your capabilities are now and in a year from now. And there's one thing that you have to factor into this, which is the emissions that we're going to see post-havening are going to be different than what we see right now. So that having that's coming next year. Instead of 2XCH, you're going to be looking at 1XCH. So I mean, if there's ever a time to be earning as consistently as possible as you can with your hard drives, it's before that. First having. This is the time. Do it now, because whatever happens price-wise, the having is going to have a pretty big implication around that Bitcoin's going to be having around the same time. I think there's a very plausible like there will be a major price action kind of inflection point. That happens sometime around that also.

Host: 55:16
The rewards would be cut in half. It will be like 3.45 for Bitcoin, I think. Around Coming back to that again, you know that got me thinking again to H2 one XH is a huge drop.

DSP: 55:30
Yeah, I know I'm looking at it like.

Host: 55:34
You know. So like there was this renting as a plot services. I do remember in the early phase of chia and they were having you access Cloud and then download your plots based on your key and stuff and you know your, your plot keys and so it's custom to you. What if? If that's built natively into what we have in the GUI or like with the pools somehow but then you know it will be there will be an option like hey, if I need an extra storage, you know somebody has unused storage sitting around there. You know like an Akash model, but then for chia, just for storage in built into the native Sort of interface. But that's just me kind of spitballing.

DSP: 56:18
I like that idea. I like that idea of it being built like I've never thought about that. Like what if the ability for me to share a portion of Blank was built in automatically? That's pretty cool, I like that thought maybe.

Host: 56:31
Yeah, we'll have to run it by Jean. Yeah, I mentioned that. That's interesting, that's different.

DSP: 56:35
I haven't heard that one before. As far as like built. Like Like yeah, there's the Akash model and it's big and stuff, but what if it was like just any old random person could be like hey, by the way, I got some plots for rent over here and I could specify the price of the plots that I wanted to rent out. Like these things are like a fraction of a penny a month or whatever, like that would be interesting, you would okay. So here's one problem with that. You would have to introduce a concept of staking so that you could slash poor production. So if somebody has poor uptime, you don't want to reward them. You know what I mean. So now you've got staking in chia, if you do that.

Host: 57:11
Yeah, I heard staking Say that again.

DSP: 57:13
Say that I'm sorry if you want to be so. I'm very much against proof of stake as a Typical consensus mechanism unless there's a very good use case, and one of the actual use cases that is kind of valid out there for it is punishing people that are poor producers of. Sleshing the slash so if you're traditionally staking something out there, you have to put up some collateral to say, hey, I'm good for it, and then somebody can you know intern to a smart contract with you. I don't think that shea themselves has to build this. That this is the other thing. I don't think shea has to build this. I think they've built all the primitives for this to already happen off Chain or even synchronized on data layer, like the contract level or something like that. I think that all of those coins, all those primitives to do this actually probably technically exist right now. Now one thing you can't do is necessarily transfer a plot contract address, so you would be still the earning person and you would be responsible, I believe, for the distribution of the earnings to that person. Versus Changing the plot to their plot. Could you replot? And if you could do it really fast I mean you might be able to replot and do it really fast you might enter into a hard cycle of always replotting then and that might not be well. That wouldn't be, as energy efficient is just farming for sure.

Host: 58:33
Yeah, I wanted to know then why we need slashing. If some say, bad actor, messes with your plots, like suppose me, as I'm thinking of a scenario I as a user, I download shea client and I say have one single drive and I don't want to buy more drives because you know it just offsets my cost. And I go in the client and say okay, I might need some storage somewhere here.

DSP: 58:59
Somebody's offering me 200 so I thought you were talking about fractional ownership of a farm. You're talking about downloading plots.

Host: 59:08
Cuz I am, I think I might have confused you. What I'm thinking is actually partially that where you are kind of renting out a space like storage space from somebody and then putting your own plots in that and that Connects to the pool itself.

DSP: 59:25
Okay, there is right there where you need slashing, because if you have hired out a crappy provider, there has to be repercussions for that.

Host: 59:34
I see, like by crappy, like they could. They could not plot here like, plot your thing on the or are you talking quality they could have so there's a variety of things that can happen on a farming level.

DSP: 59:49
They could put so here's a real-world one that I just was talking with somebody about earlier today. They could put too many plots at a specific compression level on too few GPUs to be able to farm it, and then you're they're gonna run into well, the spaces there, kind of, and it can report in certain aspects, but your ability to form a block when your GPU is overloaded and pegged at a hundred percent utilization is zero, so you can't actually form a block. So you would need to slash somebody if you detected that they were, for instance, running their GPU on your farm at a hundred percent Non-stop, because they're probably not gonna be able to actually form a block.

Host: 1:00:25
I See, you know that that opens up another can of worms. What if there are tools for chia that just monitor that, like if there is some kind of nefarious thing that's going on? Would that that?

DSP: 1:00:42
doesn't even have to be nefarious. That could just be Misconfiguration right configuration, right yeah. I, when I first got the Tesla P4 and I started on the giga horse platform. I actually did this on purpose, because I wanted to explore this very thought what happens if you overload a GPU? And when you overload a GPU, it essentially ramps up your lookup times to like hundreds and hundreds of seconds and it's like a backlog that you can never catch up from, and You're essentially not farming at that point in time. So you would want to catch somebody that's doing that as early as you could. Probably one of the best ways to do that would be to monitor GPU utilization and say, hey, you're at a hundred percent.

Host: 1:01:21
There's no way that you know you would be able to if they can remotely see that right, like if I'm able to see at a bare metal level what these guys are doing, like this audit, almost like a audit log of like oh okay, I can be in a contract with you only if you can show me the utilization. Then it makes sense, then I I'm trying my best to get away from the slashing concept, but maybe not in this interview, maybe next one.

DSP: 1:01:48
So the the slashing is. So here's the beauty of this. The entirety of that setup that you're talking about does not need to even be built on Chia natively, but there does have to be a trust aspect that you would have is somebody who is renting out from somebody who is a provider of the service, and Certainly the ability of somebody to misconfigure I mean, I would say, rather than malicious, most of it would just be Misconfiguration and poor setup stuff and like that. That still means you could not get what you're paying for, and so you need to get what you're paying for and there needs to be an incentive for that person that did that to stop screwing around, and you know Usually that comes in the form of monetary penalties you know, and be like a, a docker image file that they just have to install and that's boom it would. It would definitely be best to deploy it as a docker so that it's like a cohesive Monitoring system and consistent reporting system. But I think you know you could potentially have a reputation based system, that that would be another possibility market, separate market for hey, I'm renting out from this school provider.

Host: 1:02:54
What do you think like? Yeah. Yeah, I'm still trying to get away from Slashing, but that's okay.

DSP: 1:03:01
I mean, there's got to be trust in that model somewhere, because that's not fully trustless. If you want fully trustless, you got to do it yourself for the most part. But then you also have to trust yourself. Like, did I screw it up? Yep, totally.Host: 1:03:13
Well, thank you. I think this, this conversation, has been amazing. I would love to have you back again. And where can we find you? Where can we find All your amazing stuff that you build, create and, you know, educate people?

DSP: 1:03:28
on. The best thing that you can do is Hit subscribe on my youtube channel. That is youtubecom forward slash. At digital Spaceport you can also find most of the weird musings that I have on X, twitter, whatever it's called now, and that is at go spaceport and those two places You'll be able to get the vast majority of the information. You can also check out digital spaceportcom for some written guides around things like chia farming, plotting and Statistics gathering.

Host: 1:03:53
I like to put like information there about like this thing can do this and a lot of goodies too, like a lot of merch, like hard drives and stuff.

DSP: 1:04:01
More merch is coming, more isn't that works. Thank you once again.

Host: 1:04:05
Thank you.