Chia Farming & Mining – Chia Coin Plotting & Setup Guide 2021

Updated on June 21, 2021

Chia Farming & Mining

When it comes to using cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is the first name that comes to mind. Since its inception, many new types have evolved. Among them in March 2021, a new one named as Chia cryptocurrency exploded in popularity led by its innovation in the space of proofing.

As we all know chia cryptocurrency causing hard drive storage issues. The reason is the excessive use of temporary storage required for farming the chia cuurency in the blockchain ledger. The plotting process instantly consumes SSD and thereby exhausting HDD during the plotting.

The demand for bigger SSDs and HDDs has created a market challenge as people have started stocking storage devices. Despite the manufacturing companies increasing their production, they are unable to fufill the demand. This will create a challenging situation for storage manufacturing companies.

Unlike the traditional proof of work model, Chia is using the proof of space and time model. The advantage of this model is the less consumption of power which is the biggest hurdle in using cryptocurrencies.

Saitech Inc is a certified IT solutions provider & managed IT services company in US. To support eco-friendly chia cryptocurrency, saitech technology is ready to serve its clients in the USA by providing high speed and ultra high capacity SSDs and HDDs . We offer wide selection of HDD Drives & components for high end data centers.

Before we get to know the working of Chia in details, let’s consider the following questions:

• Why Chia cryptocurrency called a storage-based currency?
• How does Chia crypto work?
• Where Chia Cryptocurrency is stored?
• How does it impact the prices of SSDs and HDDs?
• Will it be a long-term option for payment and prove to be a store of value cryptocurrency?

By going through the post, you will get to know the answers to the above-asked questions.

There is no doubt that the mining procedure used in processing other cryptocurrencies is complex and power-consuming. Also, it depends on the use of many hardware devices which shoots up the process.

Chia instead allows for a much lower energy requirement by “farming” plots of space stored on a hard drive. However, to farm those plots, they first must be generated which does require power mainly coming from processor and hard drive usage.

As a storage device providing company, we provide a wide range of SSDs and HDDs and promise our customers to continue doing the same. Saitech technology is a government contractor in CA, USA, serving the entire USA by providing computer hardware and storage devices at affordable prices.

Coming back to Chia cryptocurrency, let’s take an insight to know its farming and other technical issues involved in its practical use.

Benefits of Using Storage Based Cryptocurrency

• Chia is one of the eco-friendly cryptocurrencies that operates on high-speed storage instead of power-hungry graphics cards. However, the twist is that the high consumption of hard drives will cause a shortage of storage devices in the future.
• Chia can work like a roller coaster in the cryptocurrency era. The ‘Proof of Space and Time’ principle will focus on relying on high-speed storage. If for a short time, we neglect the shortage part and assume that everything goes smooth, the use of this currency will reduce the days work in hours. This will save a lot of time and money.
• The farming process reduces the complexity and makes the processing of coins simpler and thus reduces the pressure on the developers making it feasible for them to make it a common technology.
• The possibility of obtaining the correct results increases with the use of the proof of space and time algorithm as you just need to fill the right data in the storage plots.

Difference Between Mining and Farming Cryptocurrency

Yield farming works on the borrowing and lending of funds where the investors hold the governance of tokens. Crypto miners earn rewards by generating new blocks through verified transactions in the mining pool.

Crypto Mining

In mining, the blockchain process is generated with new coins. Nodes are created and circulated in the blockchain ledger. Mining is painstaking, costly, and time-consuming technique. The key factors of the mining process are:

• By mining, you can earn cryptocurrency without having to put down money for it.
• Bitcoin miners receive Bitcoin as a reward for completing “blocks” of verified transactions that are added to the blockchain.
• Mining rewards are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to a complex hashing puzzle first, and the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is related to the portion of the total mining power on the network.
• You need either a GPU (graphics processing unit) or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) to set up a mining rig.
• The involvement of storage devices is less in mining as compared with farming since the PoW algorithm is used to discover new plots.

Crypto farming

On the other hand, the Crypto farming process makes use of the unused storage of your laptop, desktop, or corporate network and, in return, you have the chance to receive rewards in chia for helping secure the blockchain. The key factors involved in crypto farming are:

• Chia farming allows you to allocate a certain amount of unused disk space to create plots. The only intensive process in farming is plotting.
• Hard drives are used for plotting. Once plotting is complete, your computer will begin farming and the software does all the work and tracks your rewards for you.
• Ongoing farming uses very little network bandwidth and almost no resources other than storage. That is what is causing the storage device issues. Since high power is required for plotting, there is a chance that your SSD and hard drive might crash after some time.

Hardware Requirements for Chia Coin Farming

As of now, Chia plotting takes 6-7 hours for plotting to generate a standard k=32 plot (twice as long at k=33), with a very fast Optane 905P SSD. Multiple plotting can be done if you have sufficient hardware resources. The time limit will increase accordingly.

The optimal requirement for an SSD is 14TB or 18TB storage capacity. Chia farming starts with initial plotting that is done using SSD and then transferring those plots to the HDD for final potting and storage.

Chia’s app will let you do that, but it can be a bit finicky, and if something goes wrong like exceeding the temp storage space, the plotting will crash. You might lose the work. Therefore don’t schedule your plotting.

Now as far as the Chia plotting is concerned, it can be done in two stages, faster and slower. Here are the hardware requirements for the same.

Configuration of Chia 6X plotting PC

Chia 10X Plotting PC

So far we’ve focused on the hardware needed to get plotting, which is the more difficult part of Chia farming. Once farming is done, you would like to keep your farm live online. Raspberry Pi is one of the effective ways to farm Chia coin. Chia creators have full faith in using this software. It is better to sync with the Chia blockchain and then manually copying the database over to your Pi setup to get started.

You can use a simple PC with maximum SATA ports on the motherboard. You can also make use of USB-to-SATA adapters and USB hubs.

Once the farming is done, you can free the dozens of hard drives connected. Running 50 HDDs is equal to running for the same amount of power as a single RTX 3080 mining Ethereum.

How Chia Can Reduce Energy Consumption – Green Cryptocurrency

Environmental concerns have always haunted the use of cryptocurrency. It was a challenge to reduce the power consumption consumed in the mining process. Chia claims to be a green-energy champion. Here’s the reason for the concept to claim as eco-friendly crypto coins:

• The technology supports the home mining process that reduces the work of the vendors maintaining the chia network, thus saving a lot of power.
• Chia favors predictable, continuous inflation over a hard cap thus the work is always in control and progress.
• The proof space and time techniques do not enforce any extra hardware that creates extra cost or extra infrastructure which is a plus in the case of cryptocurrencies.
• Chia is a blockchain and intelligent transaction platform emerging as one of the new entries in the world of cryptocurrency. As the money involved is huge, every move we take matters not only from a technical perspective but from the financial point of view too.

Leaving the hard drive shortage issue behind, the technique is no doubt an efficient, secure, and mainstream type.

Steps Involved in Farming Chia – Chia Network

Note: Before we get to know more about plotting, it is important to note down that once the process starts, it can’t be stopped in middle. Therefore, a dedicated device has to be used for this purpose.

Another important point to note down is that if the temp storage of the laptop or PC you are using overfills during plotting, the system will crash. Most of the time in such cases, you will not be able to recover data.

To start with plotting, install Chia software. Once installed you’ll need to let the blockchain sync up before you can get to work on farming. However, you can still create plots before the blockchain gets fully synced as it takes nearly 10 hours to do so. The extra block can be added later on.

You need to create a new private key to start farming. It is a 24-word mnemonic. It is to be stored in a secure place.

The main page access will be given once the sync process is completed. The Wallets and Farm tabs on the left won’t have anything useful right now, so head over to Plots and get started on the plotting process.

The previously generated plots can be added to this folder. If you were to gain access to someone else’s plot files somehow, without the key they’d do you no good.

Here we have taken six concurrent k=32 plots, with a ten-minute delay between each plot starts. That should result in roughly a ten-minute delay between plots finishing, which should be enough time for the program to move a finished plot to the final directory.

The Temporary Directory will be your big and fast SSD drive. You could try for a smaller delay between plots starting, but six concurrent plots will certainly put a decent load on most SSDs.

Note: As per the specification each plot consumes 239 GB of temporary storage per plot.

Once everything is set, click the Create Plot button at the bottom, and walk away for the next 6–8 hours. If you come back in eight hours, hopefully, everything will have finished without incident and you’ll now see active plots on your Chia farm.

Chia farming can be done on a smaller scale and a big scale using multiple PCs. The process on large scale is known as Chia Harvesters. Since the Chia network traffic doesn’t use a lot of bandwidth, there’s no sense in having multiple PCs (especially for a large farm) all trying to sync up. The current blockchain size has already breached 2.6 GB of capacity, and it’s only going to grow larger over time.

Ideally, you want to choose your fastest PC for the full Chia node, then configure all of the other PCs on the network as harvesters. These will point at the main node and won’t require synchronization and all the other extra stuff.

Role of storage Devices Manufacturing Companies

This post is written to spread awareness and a direction to the storage device manufacturing companies to increase the production of Solid State Drive and Hard Disk Drive.

In the coming times, the companies selling storage devices such as Saitech Technology, USA will play a vital role. They have to stock the drives for future use as the technology will become popular, everyone will require buying extra storage devices.

Also, the bigger SSDs and HDDs will be required to farm the new cryptocurrency. The sooner you approach a storage device company, the bigger benefit you will gain!

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