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The self-proclaimed dogefather Elon Musk dropped a bomb of an announcement earlier this month. He announced that Tesla wouldn’t accept bitcoin (BTC) payments in purchasing their electric vehicles. While everyone’s gone a bit loco that time, there crypto folks out there who turned their heads to another virtual currency said to be greener than that of the above-mentioned digital gold.
Chia vs Bitcoin
It’s almost certain that most of the crypto community is well-acquainted with Chia, which is deemed by many as the green crypto. Unlike bitcoin that utilizes a “proof of work” consensus mechanism, Chia uses what they call “proofs of space and time.” Yes, it’s clean and all, but how do you mine it?
People who are familiar with crypto mining know that such currencies like bitcoin would require massive amounts of processing power like in graphics cards (GPUs) to get you going. Chia utilizes storage plots for it to be mined, and it is important that these plots need to be filled in with the right data. You may think of yourself as a farmer at this point because such an analogy is intentional, according to Tom’s Hardware.
As mentioned, your field will be your PC’s hard drive. It is essential to clear up your drive with any files on that storage device that you think is eating up space. Once your plots are set, you can now sprinkle the seeds on those plots in the form of “special cryptographic hashes” that connects them to the Chia network.
How to begin farming
Now that you know how a Chiacoin can be farmed, you can now go ahead and download and install Chia’s blockchain software on their website, as this is available on several operating systems. In the event your PC detected it as a form of malware, don’t fret. Click on either “run anyway” or “more info” to launch it (this is on Windows).
You’ve already downloaded and installed the Chia blockchain, made plots, and scattered the seeds, and you can now pat yourself in the back. You’re an official Chiacoin farmer. Be reminded, however, that your computer needs to be open at all times while farming it. Otherwise, the entire process will fail. It is advisable to turn off sleep mode (in Windows) to keep it up and run.
While the farming process does eat up electrical power, it is way lesser than mining using GPUs. Debugger even noted that Chia can still be farmed even on an “extremely low-power hardware” like a Raspberry Pi.
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.
