Decentralized Markets Are Springing Up All Around Us & It’s Great
Farming green cryptocurrencies, investing in Doge, and collecting NFT baseball cards are all part of my new identity.
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I became a proud Chia farmer a few weeks back, and… that’s probably one of the weirder sentences I’ll ever write, honestly.
For those who don’t know (which is still most people, I’m guessing), Chia is a new, recently released eco-friendly blockchain and a greener alternative to energy-intensive cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It was created by Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, so it has real potential I think.
I first heard about it on Kevin Rose’s new podcast, Modern Finance, which is a topic I’ve been diving deeper into lately. I’ve long been a fan of the nostalgia market and particularly sports cards as investments but I’m just now getting into things like cryptocurrencies and NFTs. “Why not?” is what I say.
Anyway, when I heard all one needed to do to “farm” Chia coin was set up a few digital plots on some empty hard drive space, I said sure and navigated over to Amazon to purchase a five terabyte external hard drive. Then, I installed Chia’s software, connected my “full node” to its “mainnet,” and several hours later (basically a full night), everything was synced.
Life on my Chia farm is hilariously hopeful.
Here’s the funny thing I discovered: creating plots tends to take several hours as well, especially since I’m just rocking a simple laptop configuration with an external hard drive plugged in via USB. Even I know a desktop rig with an internal solid-state drive would be a much better setup.
When I finished my first plot, the “Expected Time to Win” Chia literally said “1 year,” which was equal parts bummer and hilarious to me. I could only laugh; I knew full well I didn’t really know what I was doing. But a single plot only takes up a little over a hundred gigabytes of hard drive space, so I figured it was no big deal. I guess I’ll just make more and see!
