First-time Chia (XCH) Farming Experience — an ignoramus’s confession

Chia, the recently launched cryptocurrency based on the premise of using space and time for consensus, has a promise of being the “green” among the cryptocurrencies. I won’t go into too much detail on Chia or how the technology works, as you can easily find many useful sources on the internet. In this article, I would like to share my experience jumping into Chia farming (similar to mining for other cryptocurrencies) for the first time. Please judge harshly.

Having been in the digital storage industry, I was excited to jump on to this recently. Instead of doing my homework and reading the materials available online, I decided to jump right in. I started some time at the end of April 2021, I searched the internet for a few “tutorial” articles on how to get started farming Chia and off I went. I have an old Windows 10 computer that I still use (about 5 years old), and I thought it was decent enough so I downloaded the Chia software and launched.

The tutorial article I was following talked about plotting or creating plots. Until you have at least 1 plot, no farming will take place, so naturally, let’s create a plot. The GUI has a nice interface for you to create plots. The default options seem good. I have an SSD but it doesn’t have enough temporary space for plotting, so I used an HDD. “This is just experimentation,” I thought, “let’s see what happens.” Initially the GUI started to plot and gives you a percent complete progress bar for each active plotting process. I stared at it for about 5 minutes. “I think it’s moving, is it moving?” I dug around a bit and found an option to “View Log”. That’s much better, I can see progress as it plots. Stared for another 10 minutes, “This is taking awhile.” If I remember correctly, it took either 10 or 12 hours for the plotting to finish 1 plot! I decided to actually go read up on things half way through. The plotting process takes awhile. Others have claimed to be able to plot at a faster rate, 4 to 6 hours. But they probably have better setup (farming rig). “It’s ok, I’m not really serious about this, just wanted to see how it works.” After I got one plot, I wanted to see how farming works, so I switched over to the “Farm” interface on the GUI.

• Estimated network space: 1.334 EiB — “That is lot.” so I thought
• Estimated Time to Win: 8 years with “Actual results may take 3 to 4 times longer than this estimate”

What started out as “Let me just see how it is.” became, “I actually want some XCH and I can’t wait 8 years!”. Ok, so let me just up the game a bit. I jumped online and ordered the following:

• 2 TB SATA SSD (for plotting)
• 2x 8 TB external USB HDD (for the plots)

I was thinking, 101 GB plot takes 8 years, I should be OK with 16 TB. “I’m not that serious about this, but I can probably get something with 16 TB.” The drives arrived with little delay and I was going again. By that time, I have had 3 plots! Still years away from a reward, but now I can catch up. Yes, things did improve, though I made many mistakes playing around with plotting settings and caused either the application or my computer to crash many times. If things crash while plotting, there’s no resuming. All unfinished efforts are lost. Live and learn…I was able to eventually create 5 plots/day.

Comes May 3rd, XCH had started to be listed on some exchanges for trading, though not available for the exchanges that I’m familiar with. Netspace had reached 1.756 EiB as I’m catching up from 8 years to 4 years. I have eventually gotten the estimate down to less than a year. However, at the same time, Netspace is growing exponentially. I’m struggling to keep up and can’t reach escape velocity for 5 months win time estimate. There had been news floating around of a digital storage shortage. I had to verify and it was true. Many of what I saw that was available days ago had now became sold out. What’s still available had almost doubled in price. I got a bit more serious and hopefully this would be a limit to my seriousness. I don’t want to be chasing this further. I ended up getting another 48 TB of storage for the plots. Plotting takes up a lot of temporary storage, but it seems to take up a lot of RAM, too. I was hitting a 3 to 4 concurrent plots with 16 GB of RAM. I have upgraded to 32 GB.

As of May 21st, Netspace has reached 8.312 EiB. I haven’t been plotting at full speed as I’m still trying out different things, but I’m sitting at about 11.686 TiB worth of plots. It’s still nothing compared to Netspace and I’m running to just maintain relevancy.

Next step is to keep researching, collect data on the plotting process, do some analysis, and figure out ways to optimize plotting with what I have. If you are interested in farming Chia and can take away one thing from this experience, try to get serious from the start and plan things out, even if you think you won’t be serious. I do want to earn some XCH, but I think the journey will still be fun as I challenge myself to continue learning and see what it leads.

Source: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/first-time-chia-xch-farming-experience-an-ignoramuss-confession-dba3c33e30a9?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency