Recently there has been a lot of new hype around a cryptocurrency called CHIA. Yeah kind of reminded me of the cha cha cha chia pets if any of you remember that lol
Anyways this cryptocurrency claims it solves the issues facing POW Proof Of Work blockchains in that it's more energy efficient. While this is true and while the barrier to entry is low I wanted to dig into this more and give you a few important things to be mindful of.
What Is CHIA
CHIA is a blockchain and smart transactions platform that is *easier to use, *more efficient and *secure.
That line is taken from their website at chia.net and I put * next to each as I want to dive into each of them.
- Easier To Use
Yes, in fact getting setup only takes a few minutes and it simply runs in the background. Just download the code and blockchain and you'll be up to speed in no time after a syncing process.
- More Efficient
If your talking about power than yes. This chain runs off of free hard drive space you have which are called Farms. You setup these farms on your hard drive depending on size and how much room you want them to take up. Having more "farms" on your hard drive allows you a better chance to be selected to mine a block.
Yes, this requires much less power then running a bunch of GPU's or even CPU's the issue comes from wear and tear on your hard drive. You'll want to be using SSD's in this case but SSD's are prone to failures still for multiple read and writes to the hard drive and quickly degrades a SSD causing them to fail out and become trash. While a SSD does take up less room you're most likely going to start crashing them rather often with this new blockchain. So while you are saving the environment from electric costs you are in fact maybe being even more damaging to it as these hard drives will be going to land fills and being produced more and more.
- Secure
I haven't looked much into this but lets me honest. Unless you give up your keys, passphrase or hand over your open hardware wallet etc every block chain is rather secure for the most part. It really comes down to how you handle your data and info and not really the blockchain itself.
Is Mining CHIA Worth It
In my opinion no. Unless you have a low power computer hanging around with large SSD hard drives just sitting around then yes why not try mining it and giving it a shot.
I would highly discourage running it on a system you actively use in which you don't want to lose data or have your hard drive crash.
Are you mining CHIA? If so let me know in the comments and how your experience with it has been.