Farming Chia: First Time User Guide
In early 2021, the cryptocurrency "Chia" exploded in popularity led by its innovation in the space of proofing. Shifting away from a more traditional proof of work model that other cryptocurrencies use, Chia adopted the proof of space and time model.
This model is an answer to the complaint that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies burn up way too much energy, and this new model is much greener. Instead of throwing computational power in the mining process, Chia instead allows for a much lower energy requirement by "farming" plots of space stored on a hard drive.
However, in order to farm those plots, they first must be generated which does require power mainly coming from processor and hard drive usage. This creates a short-term use of power that leads to a long-term farming process that hardly uses anyway. That initial process is called "plotting" and is what you need to do if you want to try to earn some Chia coins.
The Chia software is available on most operating systems, but for the typical user, I'll cover the experience in Windows. Furthermore, you can use the Chia GUI or CLI (command line) to operate the program, and I will focus on the GUI as the easier means to learn how this whole thing works.
