Whoa, what is Chia? There are a million crypto projects out there, you can’t possibly keep track with all of them. And you shouldn’t, but this one I like.
Here’s why:
- It’s made by the creator of BitTorrent Bram Cohen, so I know it’s something worthy of a second look.
- It mines using unused hard drives. The resources to farm after finishing the plots are low, I can use an older computer.
- The coin price is quite high, making it perfect for dumping it for more bitcoin.
- There’s Chialisp, which is a language for Dapps to run. I’m not sure of the details but I guess this will give it some sort of a use-case and demand for quite some time.
The official arguments are that it’s a greener bitcoin, but there are already professional farmers with industry-level equipment running chia on petabytes of storage space. So green goes out the window.
It was supposed to be able to run on spare hard drives and idle time just like bitcoin itself was supposed to be mined by spare CPUs. We all know how that turned out.
I don’t believe the whole green schtick for a second, it’s all crap. This is about money. But at least Chia isn’t lying to us. Unlike Ethereum, it clearly says it will be centralized, and the company Chia plans to go public. That makes it a real company instead of a patchwork of various developers and ideologies. That obviously flies in the face of decentralization, but let’s be real: Only bitcoin is truly decentralized.
Now, Chia farming is quite easy. You download the client from chia.net, you make a plot on your free disk space, set up a temporary folder and a target folder, and you let it run. All you need to pick are the 101 Gb plots for now. The lower ones are for testnet, and the bigger ones are for future scaling.
Plotting takes a lot of time depending on your CPU and RAM. From 5 to 12 hours. It gets stuck at 31% and at 100%, so don’t shut down the client, you’ll lose all your progress. If it does get stuck, delete all the files in the temporary Chia plotting folder and run it again. That temporary plotting folder will fill up with about 300 Gb of data, so you need to account for that disk space too.
As soon as you have a plot and the client has synced, you should be up and farming!
Yay!
Your chances of winning Chia coin are so low that it might take 2 years to earn some. Well, it’s all about chances. You can think of it like this: You plot a parcel of storage space like land, by figuring out a cryptographic algorithm that creates a sort of a bingo card. Once you have a bingo card, all the client does is check the blockchain and see if it has the lucky numbers. If you do have the lucky numbers there’s a 1/512 chance of earning Chia. Bingo!
The more plots you have, the more bingo cards, the more chances of winning.
The problem is that at time of writing this the network space has exploded to *checks wallet* 2.5 Exabytes!
Holy crap!
It was under one Exabyte when I started plotting for fun.
Some people are buying hard drives en masse to get in on this. Is it worth it? I don’t know. The price of Chia is 590 dollars at this moment of writing this and dropping slowly https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/chia-network/
I expect it to stabilize at some point. Let’s be real, even if it hovers at around 200 it’ll still be good.
For some resources, this site offers plenty of links. https://chialinks.com/
For example, it lists many more exchanges that carry XCH than the ones listed on Coinmarketcap. https://chialinks.com/exchanges/
For video, I’ve found this youtuber quite helpful, Coin Breakthrough. He’s a shitcoiner and promotes plenty of other coins, but I like the DIY aspect and how he deals with Chia.
In conclusion, is Chia worth mining? Or rather, farming?
I have no clue. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of weeks but I didn’t make a dedicated machine for it. I just cleared out a couple of older hard drives I had in a box and plotted them, it took days. Because of the stress it puts on the drives, I don’t mind breaking those older ones. But that means I plot slow and can’t possibly keep up with the rest of the expanding network.
I plan to join a pool when the developers introduce the option into the wallet. That’s expected around June. I might join one like Foxypool https://chia.foxypool.io/
It’s the same as bitcoin, after a point it was impossible to mine solo and the joined forces of a pool is the only thing that made sense.
So, we’ll see. I just like DIY projects, I like Chia for some reason, but I don’t buy into the greener bitcoin propaganda of it. I just need something to mine so I can buy more bitcoin.
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