How can ordinary people participate in Chia Network mining?
The tokens have not started circulating yet.This article is sourced from Rhythm BlockBeats.
According to official news from the Chia Network project, the Chia blockchain has now released version 1.0, and the mainnet officially launched at 10 PM Beijing time on March 19.
This project, founded in 2017 by Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, aims to create a programmable currency platform. Unlike mining, Chia uses "farming," a method of acquiring blocks by utilizing existing idle hard drive space distributed across global nodes. It is understood that Chia Network has raised approximately $16 million in venture capital since its establishment in 2017.
The Former Bitcoin Killer
Like most projects, Chia has been labeled as a "Bitcoin killer" since its inception. Its consensus mechanism of Proof of Space + Proof of Time was once seen as a potential replacement for Bitcoin's PoW consensus mechanism, as the former does not require massive electricity resources for mining.
In the Chia network, mining is replaced with the term "farming," where miners validate the blockchain using hard drive storage space.
In 2017, Chia secured $3.395 million in seed funding led by Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, with participation from A16Z, Greylock, Danhua Capital, MetaStable Capital, DCM Ventures, and others.
In 2018, Chia initiated a new round of $5 million financing, led by Slow Ventures, with follow-on investments from Collab Crypto, IDEO, and Naval Ravikant. Jill Carlson, Executive Director of Slow Ventures, stated that the venture capital industry has lost confidence in Layer 1 blockchain projects, but Slow Ventures still looks forward to Chia's mainnet.
The launch of the mainnet means that ordinary users can participate in its mining.
Mining Tutorial
For this mining process, you need to prepare a solid-state drive (SSD) larger than 332 GB and a hard disk drive (HDD) larger than 101 GB. The SSD is used to store cache files, while the HDD is used to store the final plot files.
For testing, Rhythm BlockBeats prepared a 500 GB Western Digital Black SSD and a 4TB Seagate Barracuda HDD.
- Download and install the software, and create a wallet address
Software download link: https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/releases/tag/1.0.0
After installing the software, click "CREATE A NEW PRIVATE KEY" to create a wallet and record the 24 mnemonic words. This wallet address is also the mining address.
- Plot Disk (P Disk)
Click "Plots" and then "ADD A PLOT."
Since the minimum cache file (about 332 GB) is larger than the final generated file (about 101.4 GB), it is recommended for users with SSD capacity smaller than HDD capacity to perform multiple P disk operations.
Rhythm BlockBeats' actual testing shows that completing one P disk takes more than 7 hours. Therefore, if you want to engage in more professional Chia mining, it is recommended to purchase a larger capacity SSD and use multiple plot files for simultaneous writing of cache files.
P disk process
- Click "Farm" to check the mining status
According to the page data, participating in mining with only the minimum requirements (i.e., using only 101 GB) would take 10 months to mine one block. Therefore, ordinary users can join a mining pool to participate in mining. Meanwhile, Rhythm BlockBeats will also fill up the 4TB hard drive and test the block generation speed, with subsequent test results to be updated in this article.
Token Distribution
According to information from the official website, the current distribution of Chia network tokens (XCH) is still chaotic, with discrepancies between the Chinese and English pages.
XCH token distribution mechanism, image source: Chia official website
Taking the English version as an example, XCH provides a reward of 64 tokens every 10 minutes for the first 3 years, halving every 3 years. After 12 years, starting from the 13th year of the mainnet launch (the fourth halving), the Chia network reward will remain at 4 tokens every 10 minutes.
Mining Experience Leaves Much to Be Desired
After two days of testing, the experience of Chia mining is not satisfactory. After multiple tests, the P disk process cannot be paused, so it is necessary to ensure that the system remains stable during these hours. Additionally, since the cache file is larger than the final plot file, for ordinary users, the SSD capacity is often smaller than the HDD capacity, making it impossible to perform multiple file P disk operations simultaneously, resulting in a significant waste of time.
According to the data provided by the mining pool, the current difficulty of the entire Chia network is about 132.78 PB, with a computing power of about 132.66 PB, equivalent to about 44,000 4TB hard drives. Ordinary users participating in Chia mining may consider joining a mining pool.
Data from the mining pool shows that the average daily output per PB of hard drive is 57.68 XCH. For a 4TB hard drive, calculated at 550 yuan, it corresponds to a daily output of 57.68 XCH for a hard drive worth 140,000 yuan. Since the current price of XCH is unknown, participation in mining should be approached with caution.
