Functional and complete guide to Chia coin farming
I’m not going to go into the fundamentals of this currency here. In simple terms, this is a new cryptocurrency, operational since May 2021, whose future is still in the stars. However, it is interesting. What makes it interesting? It uses the principle of proof of space and time, i.e. proof by work and time. Thus, hard drive space is needed to mine it, and farming as such costs far less electricity compared to mining BTC or ETH.
I went through several discussions, videos and tutorials to get a comprehensive picture of how this cryptocurrency can be mined. In none of them did I learn everything. So here I will try to put it all together.
What you need to harvest:
To farm Chia you just need any computer with a large disk. But we don’t start farming.
First you need to create so-called fences, which are basically processed data. The fences need to be created. While almost any arbitrary storage medium can be used for this, you need a really fast disk to actually create a fence in a reasonable amount of time anymore. How fast? In principle, there is no point in dealing with ordinary disks, and dare I write that even ordinary ssd disks. Even the M2 ssd drives, which are the fastest ones today, create fences very slowly. In this case it is a good investment to consider and invest. Today, a basic M2 SSD with 1 TB of memory takes about 24 hours to create 10 fences. So, to really make sense, I recommend looking for a drive with a write speed of at least 6000 mbps and a capacity of 2TB. Here we come to the first investment. One such drive costs around 10 000 CZK. Next, what is very advisable is to have enough free ram memory. At least 16 GB, but more likely 32 Gb suitable for plot processing is to have a faster processor. You can even buy the fences their price, however, just today skyrocketed to 12 euros and is still rising.
So we have created a fence and now what to do with it? We can keep it on the SSD, but then we will miss the space for creating the fences. So what to do with it? Well the ideal is to move it to any internal or external drive. But here we are at another investment. One fence is approximately 108 Gb, so we need to invest in external storage. Depending on how fast and how many plots you create you will need space. For starters, I recommend a 6 TB drive. There we are with a price somewhere around 4000 Kč. Really any drive can be used, so don’t invest in anything expensive unnecessarily.
Cost if you already have a more powerful computer: 600 EUR
Cost if you don’t have a fast computer: 1000 EUR
Optimal configuration for home mining:
Multi-threaded processor, for example Rizen 7 (8 cores 16 threads)
Minimum 32 Gb ram, preferably 64 Gg
SSD Disk M2, read speed 7000 Mbps, write speed 5000 Mbps ideally 2TB (not available at the moment). So 1TB is enough
20 TB drive (multiple drives) ideal at the moment in price/performance ratio 5 TB drives, any ext. drives.
Graphic card – any.
How do you start?
First, you need to download the Chia network app from chia.net . It is available in Mac, Anbutt, Linux and Windows versions. Ironically, it is about 10% slower on windows than on other systems. After downloading the app, you install it and it opens the client app where you create a new wallet with 24 word seed. I recommend that you copy the words and don’t take pictures anywhere. It is the same as with all other cryptocurrency wallets.
As soon as you enter the Chia environment, the app will start downloading data from the blockchain and that’s a sign for you to start creating individual fences. Each fence is 104 GiB which is of course some 108 GiB. The process itself will take roughly 2.5 times that. So if you have an empty 1 TB SSD, you can start producing a maximum of 3 fences at a time. The actual fence creation process can then take several days. It depends on the speed of your hardware as well as the difficulty of the network. Now for the actual setup.
Go to the plots option and click on ADD A PLOT, in the first option I recommend leaving the value 101.4 GiB (which needs roughly 260 GB of memory). The smaller value was only workable for the test network, and making larger plots will take you an infinite amount of time.
For a value of 2 you are already selecting the number of fences count that you will need about 250 Gb of free space for one. Below you can set whether the disk will create all fences simultaneously or sequentially. I personally recommend simultaneous, but if you want to save disk, choose the Plot in parael option. I’ll describe why I don’t save disk in the tweak below. If you choose another setting I recommend increasing the amount of ram used to at least 4000 Mb and setting a higher CPU core count. About 2/3 of the other values I would leave alone.
The next thing to set up is a temporary folder on the SSD to plot. It’s up to you what you name it.
In the next box you choose where to store the produced fences. Ideally on a classic disk.
Well, finally you start the actual fencing and now you just have to wait.
You can make a calculation of any gains here.
Free chia cake from here.
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