The Space Farmer – Week 1

I’ll try to drop one of these every Monday to cover the past week in Chia and look ahead to anything we’re keeping our eye on.

Starting this week’s update is easy. 

On Friday March 19th, the Chia Network dropped the green flag for the Chia blockchain and moved all the space farmers from testnet to mainnet. I highly recommend going back to watch the YouTube replay of the event.  The Chia team introduced each team member from every corner of the globe and the community met the team members we’ve been chatting with for the past few months.

I joined the community relatively late at the end of 2020, but saw the work the Chia team put in to develop and deploy the product daily. You could really feel the sense of excitement and accomplishment from everyone on that call.

As for the drop, it absolutely went off without a hitch.  We were nervous to hear “It is flying” implying the initial net space was significantly higher than the difficulty set for 100PiB.  The netspace estimate showed 500PiB and the first few blocks were created quickly. It turned out to be short term variance and the net space estimate settled around 105 PiB to start. 

After a collective sigh of relief and champaign toasts, Gene Hoffman, Bram Cohen and the Chia team answered questions from the Zoom chat for the next few hours.  Here is the link to the rewatch of flag drop : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpNJcjDcfrk

I’m writing this on Monday morning and the Chia net space is estimated at ~127PiB.  We guess this growth is some new comers getting plots online and mostly testnet plots moving over to main net.  One of the main factors of decentralization is node count, and as of Monday morning there are 1176 unique addresses that have won XCH. We’ll watch the net space and unique addresses total closely this week to evaluate the growth of nodes and networks. To track this yourself visit our friends at www.chiaexplorer.com.

Switching gears, Bram Cohen was on Kevin Rose’s new crypto podcast “MoFi: Modern Finance”. They covered Chia, Proof of Space and Time, Bitcoin mining vs. Chia farming, and tons of other great topics around Chia. https://www.mofi.net/chia-a-new-cryptocurrency-launching-soon-built-by-bram-cohen-founder-of-bittorrent/

I wanted to plug a couple awesome guides released by storage_jm on Chia Decentral. We have an SSD buying guide and an HDD buying guide to optimize your Chia farming.  Give us a follow on twitter @ChiaDecentral and be on the lookout for more guides on Chia farming and plotting.

We also host a weekly “Sunday Chia Talk” on Clubhouse. Join the Chia Crypto Blockchain group and pop in to ask your questions and meet other members of the community. This week we had Gene and Bram in the room answering questions for 2 hours.

I can’t begin to say how excited we are to watch this project grow.  This community has been incredibly welcoming and helpful and will be one of the key drivers to the project’s success.  

We’ll see you next week and happy farming!