CHIA Mining Process

Chia Parameters

Name: Chia

Chinese name: Chia

Abbreviation: XCH

Is it ICO: No

Pre-mining: 21 million as strategic reserve

Revenue per block: 64 Chia rewards every 10 minutes

Halving strategy: Halving every 3 years, 4 Chia every 10 minutes from the 13th year

Differences from traditional mining

Unlike BTC and ETH which use Proof of Work (POW), Chia uses "Proof of Space and Time" to mine using the remaining storage space in storage devices (computers, servers, NAS, Raspberry Pi).

Before starting mining, you need to sow (plots) in the idle hard disk space, and then the farmer (farmer) looks for the best answer to the block explosion on the already sown P disk files (plots files). The essence of Chia hard disk mining is to write encrypted data to the hard disk first (plots process), and then the mining program looks for the best answer in the P disk files (farmer process), so the higher the total capacity of your P disk files relative to the total network capacity, the easier it is to explode blocks, and the higher the corresponding mining income.

The seeding process requires CPU, memory (each P-disk thread requires 4G memory space by default) and hard disk temporary space (generating a seeding file with K = 32 specifications requires about 332G temporary space). Therefore, it is recommended to use a CPU with better performance, more than 16G memory and a solid-state drive (M2.NVME protocol SSD with a total of more than 2T is recommended) during the seeding process.

Refer to the plots platform hardware configuration table

The mining process does not require too many system resources. In theory, any storage device that can run a farmer can be used for mining.

Of course, the seeding (P disk) device and the mining device can also be the same machine. The following tutorial is to seed and mine on the same machine.

Standalone Mining Tutorial

1. Download the latest version of Chia-Blockchain heavy wallet. Download address:

https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/releases

Chia allows you to run only one harvester program on each mining machine to connect to a centralized full node wallet (heavy wallet full node) for mining, without having to run a complete heavy wallet on each machine. Using this mode can make your system simpler, use less bandwidth, space, CPU, and make your wallet key more secure. The full node wallet can connect to more other wallet nodes through UPNP or manual NAT pointing (port 8444) to the external network. When mining, it will make your overall farm faster and more efficient.

The architecture of the entire farm (mining farm) consists of a host running a full node wallet (heavy wallet full node) and other machines that only run harvesters. Among them, only your full node wallet host will be connected to the Chia network, and other mining machines running harvesters only need to connect to your full node wallet.

In order to ensure the security of communication between your harvester and the host, TLS encryption technology is used, and the full node wallet host will be a private certification authority (CA) that signs all certificates. Each harvester must have its own signed certificate in order to communicate normally with your full node wallet.

The installation tutorial of the full node wallet is not described in this article. If you need a tutorial in this area, you can refer to the article "Chia Mining Tutorial"

1. First, you need to copy the harvester-related programs from the full-node wallet installation directory. The Chia wallet path usually installed under Windows is

%LocalAppData%\chia-blockchain

We need to

%LocalAppData%\chia-blockchain\app-1.0.1\resources\app.asar.unpacked\daemon

Copy the entire folder to the USB drive (Note: app-1.0.1 is the version number of chia you are currently installing. You need to modify the path for different versions)

2. Configure the CA certificate in the full node wallet directory

(%USERPROFILE%\.chia\mainnet\config\ssl\ca folder)

Copy to USB drive

c:\daemon\chia.exe init

Command to initialize, then execute

c:\daemon\chia.exe init -c c:\ca

Command to authorize the CA certificate, so that different harvesters can be authorized with unique communication certificates to ensure the security of communication between the harvester and the full node wallet.

c:\daemon\chia.exe.configure--set-farmer peer 192.168.88.181:8447

The command configures the IP address of the full-node wallet host for the harvester, where 192.168.88.181 needs to be changed to the actual IP address of your full-node wallet.

Of course, you can also modify

%USERPROFILE%\.chia\mainnet\config\config.yaml

Modify the harvester->farmer_peer->host parameter in the configuration file (the format of the configuration file may be slightly different in different versions, please look carefully). See the figure below for details:

c:\daemon\chia.exe plots add -d D:\plots\

The command adds the directory D:\plots\ where the farmland files are located. If there are multiple hard disk paths, you can modify D:\plots\ according to the actual situation of your mining machine and run this command multiple times.

start c:\daemon\chia.exe start harvester

Command to start the harvester program

c:\daemon\chia.exe stop harvester

command, or execute

c:\daemon\chia.exe stop all -d

The command can shut down all chia-related programs running on this harvester.

Notice:

1. Open UPNP or manual NAT pointing (port 8444) on your router to ensure that the external network can be accessed normally, so that the full node wallet can connect to more other chia nodes

2. You need to ensure that port 8447 of the full-node wallet can be accessed normally by other machines (Windows Firewall needs to open this port)

3. Do not copy the entire config/ssl folder of the full node wallet to each harvester. This may cause unexpected errors and is very unsafe. Each harvester can only obtain different authorizations through the command in step 4.

4. In the current version, the operation status of the harvester cannot be viewed on the full-network node wallet interface, but you can first close the full-node wallet, then set your log level to info in config.yaml, and then restart the full-node wallet.

%USERPROFILE%\.chia\mainnet\log\debug.log

Check the log to see if there is the following message:

The new_signage_point message indicates that the farm module of the node wallet has issued a mining task to your harvester. The new_proof_of_space message indicates that the harvester has found a valid proof. You will receive many new_signage_point messages, but new_proof_of_space messages may not be multiple.