How to mine Chia coin for passive income

inb4: In the world of Chia, ‘mining’ is actually broken down to 2 parts: plotting and farming. While those are the 2 parts, generally, mining is referred to as ‘farming’ when it comes to Chia since that’s the part that will give you a shot at winning some Chia coins.

Just like in agriculture, first you plot, then you farm.

This post is meant to give you a quick overview on how to get started with mining Chia coin. If you decide to actually do it, make sure to head over to the official docs, that I’ll link to at the end.

How you earn

Let’s work backwards. You’re in this for the output right? For that passive income. Well most of you are anyways. In Chia, earning is a bit like a lottery contest. More accurately a raffles contest, in which, the more raffle tickets you have, the more likely you are to win. The raffle tickets in Chia are the plots. Got it? Moving on to the equipments that you need.

Gather your equipment

You don’t need to setup a whole rig just to get started. You don’t need to stalk websites for GPUs that are 3x their recommended retail prices. What you will need are hard drives. Both SSDs and HDDs have their own parts to play in Chia farming. You can use your existing computer for the rest. SSDs are good for plotting, HDDs are good for farming.

Plotting

Plotting refers to the creation of ‘plots’ that contains cryptographic values. These cryptographic values

1 plot is roughly 108 GB in size. This is a standard size that most people should be plotting in.

Plotting is a process that is write intensive. Therefore, SSDs are more suitable. You can create plots on SSDs at least 4 times faster than plotting on HDDs. A word of caution, most consumer grade SSDs will go bust after some time. Do some research on this.

On an SSD, one plot can take 6 hours to create. On an HDD, it can take a whole 24 hours.

Farming

Plots exists just files. Once a plot is created, they can be moved to another storage device. In comes your HDD. We prefer HDD for farming because it’s cheaper per TB and also longer lasting than SSDs. Farming is you keeping your plots connected to the network. Chia periodically scans online plots for the potential winner. If you have the winning plot, you get some XCH (Chia’s…