News How to Farm Chia Coin, the New Storage-Based Cryptocurrency

[Admin]

How to setup up a Chia coin farm, including hardware recommendations, how to create plots, and potential rewards.

How to Farm Chia Coin, the New Storage-Based Cryptocurrency : Read more

 

[v2millennium]

Plotting is also CPU demanding and slow CPU will be a bottleneck.
It takes 6 hours to create 1 plot on my 4770K using a SATA SSD, and only 4 hours on 5900x using the same SSD.

 

[R_1]

Just change the name to Toms Mining.
mining mining mining all the time.
no hard drive no problem we will add to the fire, that GPU is 1200 bucks because we fanned the flames of electricity burning fake <Mod Edit> money.

<Mod Edit>

 

[BX4096]

Cryptocurrencies are beginning to look more and more like viruses of the old days. Wasteful, useless, and detrimental to society on the whole.

I also agree that Tom's Hardware pays too much attention to this crap, particularly on the focus of promoting it rather than denouncing it for what it is.

 

[TRBob]

Plotting is also CPU demanding and slow CPU will be a bottleneck.
It takes 6 hours to create 1 plot on my 4770K using a SATA SSD, and only 4 hours on 5900x using the same SSD.

Good point, I'm confused as to how a Raspberry Pi could be used to mine given the CPU and RAM recommendations in the article.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Good point, I'm confused as to how a Raspberry Pi could be used to mine given the CPU and RAM recommendations in the article.

RPi isn't used to plot, it's used to farm. Once the plots are created, there's almost zero CPU load required to keep them online.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Just change the name to Toms Mining.
mining mining mining all the time.
no hard drive no problem we will add to the fire, that GPU is 1200 bucks because we fanned the flames of electricity burning fake <Mod Edit> money.

<Mod Edit>

We're hardware enthusiasts, and were one of the first to report on Bitcoin hashing back in the day. lf you actually think we have enough power to push Bitcoin to $57,000+, or Ethereum to $3,500+, well... you're delusional. People all over the world are capable of figuring this stuff out. Our job, as a site, is to report on interesting things happening in the hardware space, and to generate a profit for the company. (Because without a profit, we're out of jobs.) I don't have hard numbers, but I can absolutely guarantee you these articles about mining are helping to pay the bills. If we don't write this article, it won't matter: Other sites will.

Plus, Chinese Chia farmers have been going nuts over this for over a month. How many of those read about it on TomsHardware first? Answer: None. We heard about them and reported on it. Now we're writing a How To guide of sorts for our readers, pointing out what's likely to happen. Very likely when — not if! — there's a massive storage shortage that equals what we've seen in the GPU space, this is why. If you've already got a few empty HDDs sitting around, it's probably worth a shot. Don't bet the farm on hardware, pools would be super helpful, and feel free to abstain as well. But I'd rather people start farming Chia with storage than using GPUs for Ethereum, mostly because I'm selfish and I want the miners to get off my GPU lawn and go somewhere else.

I won't pretend to have all the answers to why people think crypto coins are worth something, though I will also say that if you look at regular currencies like USD or EUR, it can be just as "fake" as a crypto coin. Faith or belief in these monetary systems is what appears to keep them going, and over $2 trillion has gone into the crypto world now. ¯\(ツ)/¯

 

[TRBob]

RPi isn't used to plot, it's used to farm. Once the plots are created, there's almost zero CPU load required to keep them online.

Thank you Jarred, on the second read through after some time in between to digest, it's making more sense.

 

[spongiemaster]

Until/if there are mining pools for Chia, this isn't going to be worth it for most people even at this early stage. To fly solo, you're looking at a bare minimum of about 55TiB to make this worth while. If you don't have that storage available now, you're looking at a bare minimum of $1638 up front, just for 6 10TB drives (which equals 54.5TiB) and that price is continuing to climb rapidly. If you start plotting today with the 6x system in the article, it will take 30 days to fill those drives, so you're probably not going to see any wins for at least the first 3 weeks.

As for the profits, the numbers in this article are accurate as calculated but worthless as they don't account for the growth of the overall storage pool which is 100% guaranteed to continue. Try using chiacalculator and you'll see how big of a difference adjusting for growth makes. When entering storage amounts you must convert TB to TiB to get an accurate calculation. As mentioned about, six 10TB drives is equivalent to 54.5TiB. That's almost a 10% drop in perceived capacity.

Under the results heading there is a simple and advanced option. Simple is what this article uses, advanced tries to incorporate network growth.

Using the 54.5TiB as your pool the simplified results estimate $3390 a month or $20,340 over 6 months. If you switched to advanced, the estimate drops all the way to $6180 for six months, or barely over $1000 a month, and don't forget to subtract out $1638 for the drives from that. The estimate over those 6 months, is for 10 Chia coins or one every 18 days. This is if you have 551 plots today. If you need a month to get there, the numbers will drop significantly more.

 

[Chung Leong]

Cryptocurrencies are beginning to look more and more like viruses of the old days. Wasteful, useless, and detrimental to society on the whole.

Cryptocurrencies aren't useless. They're critical to the operation of the dark web. Entrepreneurs would have a far harder time selling narcotics or child porn without a mean to complete transactions in an untraceable manner.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Until/if there are mining pools for Chia, this isn't going to be worth it for most people even at this early stage. To fly solo, you're looking at a bare minimum of about 55TiB to make this worth while. If you don't have that storage available now, you're looking at a bare minimum of $1638 up front, just for 6 10TB drives (which equals 54.5TiB) and that price is continuing to climb rapidly. If you start plotting today with the 6x system in the article, it will take 30 days to fill those drives, so you're probably not going to see any wins for at least the first 3 weeks.

As for the profits, the numbers in this article are accurate as calculated but worthless as they don't account for the growth of the overall storage pool which is 100% guaranteed to continue. Try using chiacalculator and you'll see how big of a difference adjusting for growth makes. When entering storage amounts you must convert TB to TiB to get an accurate calculation. As mentioned about, six 10TB drives is equivalent to 54.5TiB. That's almost a 10% drop in perceived capacity.

Under the results heading there is a simple and advanced option. Simple is what this article uses, advanced tries to incorporate network growth.

Using the 54.5TiB as your pool the simplified results estimate $3390 a month or $20,340 over 6 months. If you switched to advanced, the estimate drops all the way to $6180 for six months, or barely over $1000 a month, and don't forget to subtract out $1638 for the drives from that. The estimate over those 6 months, is for 10 Chia coins or one every 18 days. This is if you have 551 plots today. If you need a month to get there, the numbers will drop significantly more.

Mining pools are slated to arrive on May 17. As for the advanced mode, it's a complex question of how things will change. 15% per week increase in storage for 30 days, followed by 150 days of "stabilization" seems fine if you use the default settings. With six 10TB drives, you'd apparently end up with $8.22K and 7 XCH after six months. If you go with the higher performance machine, meanwhile, and just keep buying more HDDs as time goes on, you could potentially end up with $21K after six months. That would require $5000 or more of storage, though. And price could go up or down -- predicting that is basically pointless.

Either way, it's still a hell of a lot better than trying to get in on Ethereum mining with GPUs, or Bitcoin via GPUs running NiceHash. The whole market could collapse as well, and leave you with a bunch of unused storage (or GPUs). That's the implicit risk with trying to mine or farm.

 

[SSGBryan]

We're hardware enthusiasts, and were one of the first to report on Bitcoin hashing back in the day. lf you actually think we have enough power to push Bitcoin to $57,000+, or Ethereum to $3,500+, well... you're delusional. People all over the world are capable of figuring this stuff out. Our job, as a site, is to report on interesting things happening in the hardware space, and to generate a profit for the company. (Because without a profit, we're out of jobs.) I don't have hard numbers, but I can absolutely guarantee you these articles about mining are helping to pay the bills. If we don't write this article, it won't matter: Other sites will.

Plus, Chinese Chia farmers have been going nuts over this for over a month. How many of those read about it on TomsHardware first? Answer: None. We heard about them and reported on it. Now we're writing a How To guide of sorts for our readers, pointing out what's likely to happen. Very likely when — not if! — there's a massive storage shortage that equals what we've seen in the GPU space, this is why. If you've already got a few empty HDDs sitting around, it's probably worth a shot. Don't bet the farm on hardware, pools would be super helpful, and feel free to abstain as well. But I'd rather people start farming Chia with storage than using GPUs for Ethereum, mostly because I'm selfish and I want the miners to get off my GPU lawn and go somewhere else.

I won't pretend to have all the answers to why people think crypto coins are worth something, though I will also say that if you look at regular currencies like USD or EUR, it can be just as "fake" as a crypto coin. Faith or belief in these monetary systems is what appears to keep them going, and over $2 trillion has gone into the crypto world now. ¯\(ツ)/¯

It is pretty obvious that you don't have ANY answers.

No, USD or EUR aren't "fake" as a crypto coin. Crypto depends on EVERYONE in the system being honest.

Take a hard look over at what just happened over in Turkey. No one is just closing a bank and disappearing with 2 Billion USD.

Crypto is the 21st century version of tulip mania.

 

[lumineZ]

I am sooo tired about reading about mining that I wanna puke....

 

[Geef]

Just change the name to Toms Mining.
mining mining mining all the time.
no hard drive no problem we will add to the fire, that GPU is 1200 bucks because we fanned the flames of electricity burning fake <Mod Edit> money.

<Mod Edit>

Are you crazy? They do a lot of mining things but not nearly as much as other things.

The name should actually be TOMSHARDONFORRASPBERRY.COM

 

[spongiemaster]

Take a hard look over at what just happened over in Turkey. No one is just closing a bank and disappearing with 2 Billion USD.

Forgot about Bernie Madoff? Defrauded investors of $65 billion USD. Enron? $74 billion USD. $2 billion? That's couch cushion money.

 

[spongiemaster]

Mining pools are slated to arrive on May 17. As for the advanced mode, it's a complex question of how things will change. 15% per week increase in storage for 30 days, followed by 150 days of "stabilization" seems fine if you use the default settings. With six 10TB drives, you'd apparently end up with $8.22K and 7 XCH after six months. If you go with the higher performance machine, meanwhile, and just keep buying more HDDs as time goes on, you could potentially end up with $21K after six months. That would require $5000 or more of storage, though. And price could go up or down -- predicting that is basically pointless.

Either way, it's still a hell of a lot better than trying to get in on Ethereum mining with GPUs, or Bitcoin via GPUs running NiceHash. The whole market could collapse as well, and leave you with a bunch of unused storage (or GPUs). That's the implicit risk with trying to mine or farm.

Chia coin value doubled on the calculation page since I posted. Was between 6 and $700 when I calculated my numbers, now it's $1241. Regardless, the point still stands that this article is grossly misleading people with the dollar amounts. The calculations in your post are only valid if you have 551 plots today. If you have to order the parts and then start plotting, your numbers are still way off because of how fast the win rate drops as time passes. Using the 54.5TiB byte plot here are the estimated monthly returns along with how many wins. Today is the 8th, so the numbers will be calculated on the 8th of the next 5 months. Chiacalculator uses a slightly different value for months so their 6 month estimate ends on November 3rd. So I can't calculate out to 6 months, but that isn't really necessary to make the point.

1st month: $4700 - 3.79 coins
2nd month: $2490 - 2.00 coins
3rd month: $1540 - 1.25 coins
4th month: $1060 - 0.85 cpoins
5th month: $800 - 0.64 coins

That comes out to $10,590 over 5 months. If you purchase the 10x system in this article, subtract $4511, so you're down to $6079. If you are buying the system today, you have to wait for the parts and then start plotting when they arrive. You're going to lose at least half the first month's estimate, so dump another $2350 off. You'll probably notice by month 4, if you're flying solo you're already more likely to get nothing that month than 1 coin. Even worse the following month. When all is said and done, if the price stays the same, you're looking at about $3000 over the next 5 months ($600/ month) with no real chance of further returns unless you are part of a pool. Now let's go back to the original article:

But right now, at this snapshot in time, you'd potentially solve a Chia block every 11 days and earn around $5,900 per month.

That's an emphatic no. You're estimated to make about half that over the next 6 months combined.

 

[pennemumo]

It's not to make anywhere near the profitability mentioned in this article, not even half within a months time unless the price per coin shoots up dramatically . Watching the growth of the network, it's growing at roughly 1% an HOUR. Every four days, at the same coin value, it will half your profit... I don't see the coin value coming any where close to doubling every four days to make up for this, I expect no better than 10% a week. Within a months time, if things continue at this rate, farmers will be lucky to make 35 cents per terabyte monthly. Even at the current price per terabyte it would take a long long long time to make back the investment. Of course, this rate will slow down and an equilibrium will be achieved... but when?

I don't see this chia thing as any better than the graphic card mining... All the services we use require space... Server farms replace hard drives more so than anything else... The increased cost of storage this is going to cause is going to trickle down as a cost to consumers in all kinds of ways.

 

[spongiemaster]

Within a months time, if things continue at this rate, farmers will be lucky to make 35 cents per terabyte monthly.

Chia won't drop that low because it will fail long before it gets there. Hard drive prices are currently north of $20/TB. At .35 a month you're look at 5 years to break even. Miners will bail long before that.

 

[Gussv]

If you've already got a few empty HDDs sitting around, it's probably worth a shot. Don't bet the farm on hardware, pools would be super helpful, and feel free to abstain as well. But I'd rather people start farming Chia with storage than using GPUs for Ethereum, mostly because I'm selfish and I want the miners to get off my GPU lawn and go somewhere else.

Never got into the mining craze, personally. Money is always nice to have 👍 however, <Mod Edit> the environment instead of getting a real job, is hard to fathom in my view.

That said, I do have the equipment to take this farming thing for a spin. It's a NAS I've assembled at some point, but never got around to actually loading it up. Got 7X14TB drives, but I hate the fact that my PC would need to be ON all the time, calculating plots, using power (i.e. electricity) and so forth.

Anyway, you think I should wait for pools to show up and sort of see how that plays out? What'd you reckon?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

That's an emphatic no. You're estimated to make about half that over the next 6 months combined.

Partial quotes are very misleading. The context was all in the article already, but I've updated it with current numbers, plus provided emphasis on the longer-term potential. FWIW, I thought Ethereum and Bitcoin both would have crashed back to $500 / $20,000 or less by now, and that currently hasn't happened. No one knows where Chia will be in six months, but we already have six weeks of Chia farmers in China and elsewhere ramping up. I suspect it's not going to be the flash in the pan you're hoping for. It also likely won't stabilize at income rates of $0.33 per TB, for the same reasons Bitcoin and Ethereum haven't stabilized at rates of $1 per day for hardware that costs $1,000 or more. Anyway, here's the current text:

At a rate of 18 plots per day, it would take about 30 days of solid plotting time to fill six 10TB HDDs. Meanwhile, the potential profit from 60TB of Chia plots (546 101.4 GiB plots) is currently… wow. Okay, we don't really want to get your hopes up, because things are definitely going to change. There will be more netspace, the price could drop, etc. But right now, at this snapshot in time, someone with 546 plots would potentially solve a Chia block every 12 days and earn around $5,380 per month. Of course, you probably don't have any plots yet.

How fast will the netspace grow, where will it stabilize, how long will it take to create your Chia plots, and how much will 60TB of plots make long-term? Those are all great questions, and the short-term answer is that income will almost certainly be lower than the simple projection above. You can use the advanced calculator to get a different projection. For example, starting from 0 plots, plotting at 1.8 TiB per day, and filling up 60TB of drives gives a potential income of $6,410 over the next six months.

But the reality is no one can say for certain where price or netspace will end up, hence the current hype and uncertainty. As with other cryptocurrencies, don't invest more than you can afford to lose.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Never got into the mining craze, personally. Money is always nice to have 👍 however, <Mod Edit> the environment instead of getting a real job, is hard to fathom in my view.

That said, I do have the equipment to take this farming thing for a spin. It's a NAS I've assembled at some point, but never got around to actually loading it up. Got 7X14TB drives, but I hate the fact that my PC would need to be ON all the time, calculating plots, using power (i.e. electricity) and so forth.

Anyway, you think I should wait for pools to show up and sort of see how that plays out? What'd you reckon?

Yeah, most likely. It will take about ... well, if it's only one PC doing the plotting, even at 30 plots per day, you'd need 30 days to fill the NAS. Most likely you'll get nothing until pools show up. Though you could always give it a shot, and just leave the non-pool plots sitting in a different folder until your NAS is full, at which point you could replot.

 

[spongiemaster]

Partial quotes are very misleading. The context was all in the article already, but I've updated it with current numbers, plus provided emphasis on the longer-term potential. FWIW, I thought Ethereum and Bitcoin both would have crashed back to $500 / $20,000 or less by now, and that currently hasn't happened. No one knows where Chia will be in six months, but we already have six weeks of Chia farmers in China and elsewhere ramping up. I suspect it's not going to be the flash in the pan you're hoping for. It also likely won't stabilize at income rates of $0.33 per TB, for the same reasons Bitcoin and Ethereum haven't stabilized at rates of $1 per day for hardware that costs $1,000 or more. Anyway, here's the current text:

I'm not hoping this fails. I have something in the ballpark of 200TiB at my disposal that I can use for this, so I am hoping for the exact opposite. Also, I'm not predicting its failure either. When I said it would fail long before it dropped to .35/TB, I meant if the price tanks, the coin will fail at some price well above .35/TB. My prediction is that this one should be here for the long term, but the monetary numbers in this article were pie in the sky never going to happen and shouldn't be there even if you attempt to tie context to them. I just hope this doesn't destroy hard drive prices and availability for more than few months.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

Plotting to a set of striped hard drives also helps. I have an i5 four core system with two striped one terabyte drives, and it creates a plot every 9 hours. When those two drives are full (17 plots) I copy them to an external USB drive to continue farming.

 

[omid666]

I'm a little confused, if with the recommended system you can farm 18 plots, why it would take 30 days to fill up 10TB HDD (91 plot)?!
"At a rate of 18 plots per day, it would take about 30 days of solid plotting time to fill six 10TB HDDs. "

 

[vmem]

Just change the name to Toms Mining.
mining mining mining all the time.
no hard drive no problem we will add to the fire, that GPU is 1200 bucks because we fanned the flames of electricity burning fake <Mod Edit> money.

<Mod Edit>

Ever thought there might be genuine interest from the rest of the community?

Rather than sit there and swearing about GPU prices, I used Tom's guides to help a few friends set up their miners, and they've already made over 50% of the cost of their GPU (3080s) since the beginning of the year, at which point they're basically at MSRP. These types of articles brings light to existing hardware uses outside of just playing games, and for some people are actually an important source of income throughout this pandemic.

Maybe instead of complaining, you can try mining a little and see if you like it. Chia is particularly great if you live somewhere where electricity is expensive or it's hot.