Enter the lottery!

If you read up on Chia on say Reddit or forums, you might get the impression you need to build an expensive and expansive Chia rig - a PC, with say AMD Threadripper, NVME SSDs, copious amounts of RAM, servers, JBODs and numerous HDDs, say petabytes.

Yeah you could do, but I really doubt the ROI.

But absolutely it is possible to get into Chia without such huge capital outlay, maybe even spending nothing.

Say you have a desktop computer (it needs to be on all the time) or even a Raspberry Pi, and a decent sized external hard drive with space on it, say 1TB.

You can plot using a regular external hard drive and then write that plot to the same hard drive as long as there is space - check this out https://www.chia.net/2021/02/22/plotting-basics.html

What is my experience?

I created a few plots using just an external HDD.

Then I bought a Samsung 500 GB NVME for faster plotting.

Filled up some HDD space I had (gave me incentive to delete a lot of old stuff) ...... and then won 2 XCH (current value around $500).

Felt inspired, I did spend a little money on a used 4TB and also got the exact same WD Black game drive P10 5TB version (liked the form factor and bus-powered).

That's it for me - no more spending.

Now doing solo OG farming and also pooled farming with Space Pool.

ADVICE

• To plot you don't need to be connected to the internet but your computer cannot sleep or restart in the plotting cycle
• To farm you do need to be connected to the internet and your drives need to be active, but you can restart or turn off your computer, you just won't be farming
• Don't get addicted to buying hard drives
• Pool if you want to see some visible income, solo farm if you want to "play the lottery"
• You need a very small amount of Chia (or MOJOs) to pool farm get some from some faucets 
• If you believe in the Chia token XCH you could even just set up a nucle.io wallet and buy some XCH from an exchange like OKEx and Gate.io

RESOURCES

Wallets

https://www.chia.net/ - the project, download the GUI or install CLI

https://nucle.io/ - METAMASK type browser wallet (SPV)

Explorers

https://www.chiaexplorer.com/ - Chia blockchain explorer

https://xchscan.com/ - another Chia blockchain explorer

News

https://chiadecentral.com/ - news site, active in the early days, now not so much

https://thechiaplot.net/ - again news, updated regularly as of now

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi6c6gqIi7Qe18lZIF98JCQ/videos - Caleb has gone off the rails a bit recently but a lot of good early Chia content (and he is also one of the founders of Space Pool)

Analysis

https://chiacalculator.com/roi - advanced cost and ROI analysis

Mining pool lists

https://miningpoolstats.stream/chia

https://xchscan.com/chia-pools

https://www.chiatothemoon.com/pools/

Pools I've tried

https://pool.space/

https://www.flexpool.io/

https://farmpool.io/

MADMAX SPEEDY PLOTTER

https://github.com/madMAx43v3r/chia-plotter

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Thumbnail photo by Smith Major on Unsplash

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