What is Chia:
Chia is a new blockchain in the crypto world that launched in February 2021 with a whitepaper and other information that you can view on the website. It is founded by Bram Cohen and wants to be a green alternative to mining (PoW) crypto. And it aims to achieve this by using unused hard drive space and making plots on these HDDs and with space and time as factors you get reward a piece of the action.
How to mine:
Go to the official website https://chia.net and download the software from there. At the time of this post, 1.1.4 is the latest version
I will be using Windows 10. Choose your OS that you use, in this example i will be using the windows version. When downloading the file, your antivirus might say it is a virus, but this is a false positive. Give it permission to download.
Beware->Chia plot files are at least 108GB in size (for K32). To plot successfully requires drives formatted to support large files; e.g. NTFS, APFS, exFAT, ext4,
Run the installer, when this is loading, Windows may ask for access to the firewall, grant these permissions
The next window will appear with your private key (this is an example and will not be used), store your keys in a secure place.
Click on the key and continue, you will now have a new window with all the options enabled. Now give it some time to sync all the information from the network.
After this is done, you will see a tab named wallet, the software has a wallet integrated where your Chia will appear that you have mined.
Now for the last part you have to make plots, this will be the part of the HDDs that you will assign as disk space and the network will use to farm. And if you get lucky and find a Chia coin, it will be added to your wallet. Go to plots.
Now click add a plot and choose your plot size, and choose number of plots. Now for the temporary directory it is advised that you use an SSD for this, it makes the whole process faster. And to store the plot, choose the HDD you want to store it on, preferably a slower large HDD.
Now you made your first plot, this will take some time to finish, depending on your HDDs and pc hardware and how big you made your plot. Usually a few hours to make and finish the plot.
Now you are all done and you add more plots if you like. Hope this guide helped you and would like any constructive feedback to make this guide better.
Happy farming.
