“Chia Green Money for a Digitial World”
This post will be dedicated to ALL things Chia Farming, and give you a list of items you can purchase to build a Chia Farming Machine, using enterprise grade equipment that can easily be sold back for what you paid for it on eBay or more since the interest in the project is gaining momentum (Estimated XCH price was $15-$20 at market launch on 5/3/2021, currently on launch day it’s trading for $850+ at the moment I am writing this).
The chia profit calculator estimates if you have 30TB of storage, you would be making close to $4k a month at the current price. At $1600+ $XCH $8k a month. (https://chiacalculator.com/)
So what is Chia??
Over the last few month’s I’ve been focusing my free time exploring new cryptocurrency projects, and after hearing Bram Cohan Founder of BitTorrent (rumored to be Satoshi Nakamoto the man behind the Bitcoin protocol- even if untrue Bram likely talked with the real Satoshi as he was part of the CypherPunk movement) talk about Chia on the MoFi podcast with Kevin Rose, I started to research it heavily. The TLDR of the project (you can read more and download the client at (www.Chia.net)) – is basically Chia is a proof of time and space consensus algorithm.
In my novice technical knowledge comparison, this brings XRP Ripple Consensus type protocol, to a new network that enables many many users to support a truly decentralized blockchain protocol (as anyone can run a node), and combines Bitcoin like rewards for the users who support the network the most (by plotting really quickly, and/or buying hard drives to store more plots). But also unlike Bitcoin and more like Ripple, Chia, INC the company is planning on having a public IPO. The company will start off with 21 million XCH, a nod to bitcoin, the rest of the supply must be earned by the farmers. It will take 21 years for the supply to double via farming. Chia, INC instead of selling their XCH is opting to eventually lend it out to avoid some of the legal hurdles of the Howie Test Ripple is dealing with now during the SEC lawsuit. Allowing it to support the $XCH market as a whole.
Chia is MUCH more environmentally conscious than using power hungry GPU’s (120+Watts per card), to support the network through proof of work, it uses hard drive storage (Idle 18TB drives = 6 Watts, spinning 8 Watts) along with a small amount of computing power to run the node. The hard drives only spin up if they pass the filter (looking for the start of the cryptographic key to solve the block)
During the podcast Bram mentioned ANYONE can participate and run a node. If they wanted to, they could also farm Chia by utilizing their free hard drive space, and TLDR per the whitepaper use their CPU/Memory/Hard Drive to generate a cryptographic plot (101GiB file- k32) to store on their hard drive. That single plot is essentially a “lottery” ticket that the network will parse and if it contains the values needed to solve the current block, the owner of the Plot will be rewarded 2 XCH (X means no country currency, CH = Chia, similar to how other crypto like XRP (RP = Ripple))
So how do you get started (Time is of the essence, as the longer anyone waits to generate plots, the larger the network grows, it’s growing at 15% every week currently!) It WILL reach a point to where it will only make sense for smaller miners to generate plots in a farming “pool” much like mining pools. If the growth continues that maybe very soon.
First you can start now if you have a computer, with free storage space on a temporary drive (highly recommend an SSD as it will be faster to generate your plots, and I recommend you don’t use your OS drive that has windows on it because plotting on a consumer grade SSD over 100+ Plots could cause a drive failure.) the temporary drive space required is 238.3 GiB/256 GB per Plot.
This is where it gets interesting, in order to generate a plot you need to use your CPU/Memory to generate the cryptographic plot. The Plot generation has 4 distinct phases, for your concerns phase 1 is the only one that utilizes multi-core (more than 1 thread).
When you create a plot you can choose in advanced settings, how many threads you want to allocate. The default is 2. For Intel CPUs it seems optimized to use 4 threads, for AMD 6 or 8 threads to generate plots the fastest. You can also choose how much Ram to allocate, the default setting seems to be optimized, I have a 3950X AMD CPU and 96GB of ram and I have used 6500 a few times, but doesn’t seem to impact it too much.
You can also do parallel plotting. So let’s say you want to generate 1TB+ (10 plots @ 101GiB). In order for this process to work, and not error out, at the minimum you need to have 2.5TB (10Plots * 256GB temp storage) of SSD temporary storage to start plotting them all at once. If you over allocate the CPU threads this will just slow down your plotting. Which may or may not be a big deal, as ideally you want to be running your plotter at 100% CPU usage, and leave atleast 4GB of ram usage free for the chia software to run, otherwise max out your ram too (if you dont leave 4GB free it will likely crash).
So what do I recommend for a setup? The following will give you a plotting machine that you can produce 2TB of plots PER DAY.
First- Buy your Hard Drives now, even if you just want to plot on your own hardware. Everyone is saying there will be a shortage, and they may be correct. There is a good thread on /r/Chia of an industry insider that has stated if the growth continues plants may not be able to keep up manufacturing hard drive head units, or they may shift from producing lower TB drives to higher TB drives because they use the same number of heads. Your choice is internal or external drives. I prefer external drives at this point, because I can plug in a large amount to USB hubs, and power strips vs. being constrained by internal drive space in a PC case (8 drives in the case below)
You can’t plot and farm if you don’t have hard drive space so buy these first.
Here are some in stock SATA hard drive choices :
18TB Hard Drive Seagate Exo’s Internal Drives ( at 2TB a day this will fillup in 9 days, the more plots you have the greater network share and more $XCH rewards you will attain), two of these will give you 36TB (6TB over the $4k/month est revenue from farming)
10TB Hard Drive Seagate External USB- Chia Mining Bundles (if you want to use these as internal drives, you can actually “shuck” the enclosures, and inside are SATA drives you can use inside your case.
ICY DOCK Rugged Full Metal 4 Bay 2.5″ NVMe U.2 SSD ( allows you to use Enterprise grade NVME U.2 SSD drives in RAID0 with the Raid Card Below this) I run 4×1.92TB U.2 SSDs and have no problem plotting 58 plots in parallel with a 50 minute plot delay. The U.2 NVMEs can be bought second hand on eBay from enterprise resellers.
High Point SSD7120 4X Dedicated 32Gbps U.2 Ports to PCIe 3.0 x16 RAID Controller (buy the mini SAS cords to connect it to the ICY DOCK 4 bay hot swap array)
AMD Ryzen 3950X 16 Cores, 32 Threads
Gigabyte x570 Motherboard- works well with 3950X, and allows up to 128GB of ram
EVGA SuperNOVA 750 P2, 80+ PLATINUM 750W , Fully Modular , EVGA ECO Mode, 10 Year Warranty ( you need a dependable PSU, as this plotter will run 24/7. SuperNova never let me down in my ETH mining days, strongly recommended)
Please check back at a later time for my U.2 Drive Recommendations, and how to setup your network to have one computer plotting and one farming. Additionally as sotrage needs expand, it maybe required to acquire a JBOD or get really creative with hard drive enclosures and SATA adaptors/power supplies. If more technical stuff like that is needed, I will consider making a YouTube video to cover setup of that.