- Name: Chia (XCH).
- Project launch: 2022
- Protocol: Proof of Space and Time (PoST).
- Extraction method: plotting and farming via hard drives (HDD/SSD).
- Limit limit: 21,000,000 XCH.
- Current stage: beta testing, the coin can be mined, transferred or purchased, services are not yet available, trading is carried out in a limited amount (through IOU).
Introduced in 2022, the Chia cryptocurrency (XCH) is positioned as the “green Bitcoin” and attracts attention due to its unusual method of mining. This was preceded by a 2-year development, led by the well-known Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol. The latter was bought by Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron (TRX) cryptocurrency ecosystem.
general information
Announced in 2022, Chia first gained widespread attention a year later when it was invested in by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital fund that owns shares of Twitter, Skype, Facebook and other leading social media companies.
Chia Network logo (simple and democratic)
The second major investor is Galaxy Investment Group of trader Michael Novogratz.
In addition to Bram Cohen, the team includes:
- Mitch Edwards is the former CEO of online retailer Overstock;
- Gene Hoffman is the former CEO of the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Key project participants
| Bram Cohen | Michael Novogratz | Mitch Edwards | Gene Hoffman |
Chia launched in 2022, but gained popularity in 2022 with the advent of the ability for miners to mine new coins. Here, too, it was not without attracting attention - cryptocurrency mining is carried out not on a CPU, GPU or ASIC, but on hard drives - HDD/SSD.
Low energy consumption compared to traditional mining methods has made it possible to talk about chia as a “green bitcoin.”
As of May 2022, the project remains in beta testing. Selling mined XCH coins is not available, however, trading in IOUs for coins is open on several exchanges.
The first successes are accompanied by the first failures - the Hotbit trading platform, one of the first to launch operations with receipts for the purchase and sale of Chia, where the listing of the currency was supposed to take place, suspended its work.
Summary
Chia cryptocurrency is a new project on the market, the development of which has been carried out since 2022. The popularity of the coin in our time is primarily due to the attention paid to it by miners who are actively involved in farming on their hard drives.
The uniqueness of the technologies and algorithms embedded in Chia, as well as the excellent idea of environmental friendliness, can serve as good reasons for the asset to gain a foothold in the market and take a significant position in investor portfolios.
The blog article has come to an end. I hope that the information I have presented will be useful to you and will help you not only understand more in the field of cryptocurrencies, but will also open up new opportunities for earning money. I wish you success!
Denis HyipHunter Knyazev
Blog creator. Private investor. He has been making money in highly profitable investment projects and cryptocurrencies since 2014. Consults partners. Join the blog's Telegram channel and our chat.
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What is a cryptocurrency soft fork?
What is it like?
Despite the comparison with Bitcoin, Chia also has features of the centralized Ripple XRP project. Bran Cohen's team, Chia Network, intends to enter the stock market in the future. As with Ripple, the majority of coins—19 out of 21 million XCH—are owned by developers, giving them complete control over the platform.
Among the advantages:
- low requirements for resources for mining - the emphasis is on hard drives, and if you wish, you can participate in mining even with a mediocre PC;
- low power consumption is another advantage for miners, whose electricity costs are reduced.
What are MiB and GiB?
When choosing a plot size, you will notice that the five raft sizes on the Chia blockchain are in MiB and GiB units rather than the standard MB and GB. What is the difference?
Essentially, there is no difference. MiB (Mebibytes) and GiB (Gegibytes) are based on the binary system rather than the decimal system. Therefore, a mebibyte is 1,048,576 bytes, a megabyte is exactly a million, and a gibibyte is approximately 1.07 gigabytes.
That is, the values presented in GiB and MiB are slightly higher than those in GB and MB.
How and where to use
Although Chia is perceived not as a decentralized platform, but as a classic coin and a green alternative to Bitcoin, this is not entirely true. Chia has its own programming language, Chialisp, a language similar to Ethereum's Solidity that allows it to interact with DeFi applications. However, Chia is based on code written in Python.
Example code in LISP-oriented ChiaLisp.
As of May 2022, XCH cannot be purchased on cryptocurrency exchanges. Internal transfers between wallets are also not available.
In the future, it will be possible to use chia in the usual way - to pay for goods, conduct cross-border transactions, or trade on one of the platforms.
Chia rate
In April 2022, the coin entered the Hotbit exchange at a price of $2,500 per 1 XCH. But such a price for cryptocurrency was short-lived and collapsed almost immediately. The CoinMarketCap service records the maximum value of the coin at a price of $1934, starting from May 3. The history of the cryptocurrency rate is represented by a small segment of the graph, which during this period of time loses its value. This is quite logical, because there was a lot of noise around the cryptocurrency before its launch, and many miners who began actively mining coins sold it at a good price at the time Chia was launched on the exchange.
At the time of writing this review, the cryptocurrency has lost 24% in value per day and is listed at $971. It can be noted that the coin rate is very volatile and changes greatly during the day. Therefore, even at a falling rate, the coin is of interest to investors playing short positions.
Technology
Chia relies on the so-called “Nakamoto consensus”. Unlike the brainchild of the Bitcoin developer, Chia eliminates, at least formally, the need for high energy costs to maintain the operation of the network. In practice, the rapid increase in the complexity of mining network blocks and the use of increasingly powerful devices by miners reduces all green initiatives to a minimum.
The algorithm used to maintain the network is not the usual Proof of Work (PoW), but Proof of Space and Time (PoST). It can be roughly divided into two parts:
- Proof of Time. Ensures strict consistency in the time of appearance of new blocks in the network, and with them - new coins, which increases the security of the network.
- Proof of Space. Actually, the part “responsible” for using disks instead of more conventional video cards and processors to solve mathematical puzzles and then open a new block.
In network governance, Chia is closer to Proof of Work than Proof of Stake. The number of coin reserves - stacks - managed by users with an active full node does not affect how significant their decision will be in voting on the further development of the ecosystem.
Key Features
- Limit - the supply is limited to 21,000,000 XCH, of which 19,000,000 belongs to the developers.
- Security - based on the unique PoST protocol. The system is resistant to ASIC mining, which protects against the concentration of coins in the hands of one mining pool.
- Open Source - Chia Blockchain code is available on GitHub.
- Multiplatform—Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu Linux users can interact with Chia. For the latter, the work will be especially comfortable, because Python is the native language of Ubuntu.
How to mine
Chia extraction can be divided into two main stages:
- plotting - marking 109 GB areas on disks where calculations will be carried out;
- pharming (aka mining) - carrying out calculations to mine blocks of coins.
You can carry out plotting and pharming on one disk, or you can assign each disk to a specific operation. You can use HDD and SSD - the latter benefit in speed of operations.
This is what a mining farm looks like on hard drives
Although chia does not require resources, those who are serious about making money from mining are recommended to use specialized server equipment.
After successful calculations, the farmer (miner) is automatically credited with a reward to his wallet.
On topic: detailed instructions for mining Chia on hard drives.
Mining Chia
The process of mining coins on the Chia network is called pharming and can be carried out on any device that has free memory - it can even be your smartphone. The initial mining reward is 64 XCH with a block formation frequency of every 10 minutes.
Further, the reward will decrease every 3 years for 12 years, after which the halving will stop and the reward for miners will remain stable - 4 chia for each block. In addition, the developers have thought through a mechanism for reducing inflation in the network.
Mining on SSD and HDD
If you are planning to start farming Chia coin, then you first need to buy a hard drive or SSD with at least 1 TB of memory. The more memory you have, the more profitable the entire mining process will be for you.
Be prepared for the fact that if you engage in Chia mining thoroughly, you will have to buy hard drives and solid-state drives regularly. After all, they will very quickly become unusable due to the constant recording of information on them.
For the same reason, despite the hype on the market, you should not buy used SSDs and HDDs, because it is unknown in what mode they were used before you.
Program installation
- Go to the official website of the cryptocurrency, where, if necessary, select Russian and use the button “Install Chia Blockchain».
- The page that opens will describe the requirements for the operating system and hard drive formatting. Be sure to check them out.
- Find the version that suits your OS and click the download link. A software download of approximately 150 MB will begin. The download speed depends on the Internet speed; as a rule, it takes no more than a minute.
- After downloading, run the file, a window will appear in which switch to the Russian version. After that, press the button “ Create a new private key».
- Next, a set of words will be offered; you need to rewrite them or screen them. If you rewrite words manually, then note that the order in which the words are written is important - in addition to the words themselves, you also need to rewrite their serial number. Only after this press the button “ Further».
- After this, you will see the start of synchronization with the blockchain; you must wait in the status bar for complete synchronization.
Creating a raft and starting mining
After full synchronization, go to the " Parcels " section, where you will have the opportunity to create a new one using the " Add parcel " button. You can add as many rafts as the free memory on your device allows.
It is the created areas that will bring profit in Chia coins, which you can see later in the “ Wallets ” section.
At the same time, you shouldn’t expect coins to start pouring into your wallet. Their appearance directly depends on the amount of memory used, but since every 18 seconds only one of the participants in the process receives a profit, you can imagine the waiting period for your turn.
You can view your plots, track statistics and receive information about rewards through the “ Farms ” section.
Where can I buy
As of May 2022, it is only possible to purchase IOUs - IOUs on XCH. When buying IOU for cryptocurrency, you should take into account the possibility of the exchange rate falling several times with the start of trading in real coins.
Main exchanges for buying IOU Chia:
- Hotbit.io (under maintenance after a hacker attack);
- Gate.io.
Trading IOU XCH on Gate.io
Where and how to buy XCH?
As a relative newcomer to the cryptocurrency space, Chia's XCH token is not available on many leading exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance.
It can be purchased from OKEx, Gate.io and MXC, among others. Here is a step by step guide to buy XCH on OKEx, first you need to purchase Tether, a stablecoin, and exchange it for XCH.
Step 1
: Create (register) or log in to your OKEx account. Once logged in, click Buy/Sell and select USDT from the drop-down menu. Select your preferred payment method and amount and click “Buy USDT”.
Step 2
. Go to the Markets page and scroll down until you find the Chia XCH cryptocurrency. Click on it, then click on the tab labeled "Convert". Select the amount - we'll convert $20 - and click the "Convert now" button. You should now have XCH in your wallet.
Where to store
You can store XCH on a wallet that is part of the official software for miners - Chia Blockchain.
Useful link : https://www.chia.net/ru/ (official website of the project).
This is where the wallet is for now. Source:.chia.net
XCH wallets are not supported by third party developers due to the lack of coins available.
Prospects
Chia mining on hard drives has attracted widespread interest, but at the same time there have also been accusations towards hardware manufacturers - the latter are suspected of fueling interest in XCH mining, which may fade after manufacturers carry out plans to sell off storage drives.
The IOU XCH rate remains unstable - a sharp rise with the launch of trading on Hotbit was followed by a halving of the price, despite the support of the more famous Gate.io.
Among the factors that will help maintain the positive momentum is the presence of its own language, Chialisp, with potential applications in the decentralized finance, or DeFi, sector.
