What is Chia Network (XCH) | What is Chia Network token

In this article, we’ll discuss information about the Chia Network project and CHIA token

Chia was incorporated in August of 2017 to develop an improved blockchain and smart transaction platform. We are building the Chia Network to improve the global financial and payments systems. Chia will be the first enterprise-grade digital money. Chia is using the first new Nakamoto consensus algorithm since Bitcoin. Called Proof of Space and Time, it was created by Bram Cohen, the best network protocol engineer alive and the inventor of BitTorrent. Chialisp is Chia’s new smart transaction programming language that is powerful, easy to audit, and secure. Reference smart transactions currently available are: atomic swaps, authorized payees, recoverable wallets, multisig wallets, and rate-limited wallets.

We believe that cryptocurrency should be easier to use than cash, harder to lose, and nearly impossible to steal. Anyone who wants to validate transactions should be able to farm without single-use hardware or a big electricity bill.

Chia Network develops a blockchain and smart transaction platform created by the inventor of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen. It implements the first new Nakamoto consensus algorithm since Bitcoin in 2008. Proofs of Space and Time replace energy intensive “proofs of work.”

Chialisp is Chia’s new on chain programming language that is powerful, easy to audit, and secure. It will make cryptocurrency easier to use than cash or credit. Reference smart transactions currently available are: atomic swaps, authorized payees, recoverable wallets, multisig wallets, rate-limited wallets, and Coloured coins. Bram introduces Chialisp on our blog.

Green Field

We have academic papers and presentations that give detail about our new consensus algorithm and blockchain software. In 2019 we revealed our Green Paper outlining the construction of Proofs of Space and Time and illustrating many of the design choices of Chia. There is also a 2019 talk from Mariano Sorgente at MIT on how to achieve Nakamoto consensus with Proof of Space and VDFs.

Bram Cohen presented at Stanford on February 2018 on Proofs of Space. Our advisors, Dan Boneh, Benedikt Bünz, and Ben Fisch published a survey of VDFs which are the underlying technology of Proof of Time. Lipa Long published an explanation of class groups that our Proofs of Time is based on. Bram presented Beyond Hellman’s Time-Memory Trade-Offs with Applications to Proofs of Space at BPASE ‘18 in January 2018 based on the academic paper and these slides by Hamza Abusalah. Ben Fisch gave a talk at BPASE 2018 in January 2018 on Verifiable Delay Functions. Bram spoke at Blockchain at Berkeley (which starts about 20:00) in March 2018 with slides. Bram gave a talk at BPASE 2017 in January 2017 on removing waste with Proofs of Space and Time (slides).

Bram gave a talk at SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar about data structures for scaling Bitcoin with slides and Merkle Set code. Bram gave a talk at SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar about removing waste from cryptocurrencies.

FAQ

Where can I get answers to questions about running Chia?

You should first read the repository FAQ, check out the wealth of information on the repository wiki and join us on Keybase in the #testnet or #beginner channels. We have also created a good summary of the basics of creating plots for Chia.

What is Proof of Space and Time?

Proof of Space is a cryptographic technique where provers show that they allocate unused hard drive space for storage space. In order to be used as a consensus method, Proof of Space must be tied to Proof of Time. PoT ensures that block times have consistency in the time between them and increases the overall security of the blockchain.

How does Proof of Space and Proof of Time work?

Proof of space can be thought of as a way to prove that you are keeping some storage unused on your hard-disk drive. Users of the Chia blockchain will “seed” unused space on their hard-disk drive by installing software which stores a collection of cryptographic numbers on the disk into “plots.” These users are called “farmers.” When the blockchain broadcasts a challenge for the next block, farmers can scan their plots to see if they have the hash that is closest to the challenge. A farmer’s probability of winning a block is the percentage of the total space that a farmer has compared to the entire network.

Proof of time requires a small period of time to pass between blocks. Proof of time is implemented by a Verifiable Delay Function that takes a certain amount of time to compute, but is very fast to verify. The key idea of a VDF is that they require sequential computation, and since having many parallel machines does not yield any benefit, electricity waste is minimized. There will likely be relatively few VDF servers (“Timelords”), as the fastest one will always finish first and it takes only one fast and fair Timelord on the network to complete a block and move the chain forward.

What is Chialisp?

Chia has a newly developed, innovative blockchain programming language called Chialisp, which is powerful, easy to audit, and secure. Chialisp is a superior on-chain smart transaction development environment that will unlock the security, transparency, and ease of use that cryptocurrencies promise.

Where can I learn more about Chialisp?

Read our blog post introducing Chialisp. Documentation can be found at Chialisp.com.

Why is Chia better?

Chia has a new innovative Nakamoto consensus algorithm that removes the energy demands of Proof of Work from the system. Compared to other cryptocurrencies, Chia will have significantly better security due to its more decentralized blockchain. Chialisp is Chia’s new smart transaction programming language that is powerful, easy to audit, and secure and will unlock the security, transparency, and ease of use that cryptocurrencies promise. Chia is also adopting more modern cryptographic tools to enable richer smart transaction capabilities. Chia is taking a new and superior approach to funding, building, and supporting a blockchain via an eventually public, for-profit, open source development company that holds a pre-farm. Chia will use its pre-farm (Strategic Reserve) to ease the volatility of the coin to mitigate bubbles and crashes and to drive adoption of chia.

Where can I learn more about the technical details of your consensus algorithm?

We have updated our consensus algorithm and you can review and commment on our working document.

There is also a 2019 talk from Mariano Sorgente at MIT on how to achieve Nakamoto consensus with Proof of Space and VDFs.

What is the Chia Network strategy?

It is our belief that the blockchain industry is still led by developers. We intend to be the superior chain for deploying new applications and services as well as being the only serious and secure choice for applications like sovereign backed stable coins. The Chia Network business will be the first for profit company that manages a pre-farm and we intend to be the first publicly tradable “near ETF” cryptocurrency. We believe that - as Redhat and MySQL AB were necessary to drive corporate adoption of linux and mysql - we will be the source for support and training as sovereigns, financial institutions, and corporations look to use cryptocurrency in daily commerce. Finally, we believe that we will be able to leverage the storage ecosystem to drive adoption at corporations and end users as harddrive manufacturers and storage server sellers are likely to bundle space farming into their offerings.

Our Business Whitepaper is the definitive document on our strategy and approach.

What is the difference between mining and farming?

Mining requires expensive single use hardware that consumes exorbitant amounts of electricity. We are mitigating this problem through a fair, eco-friendly, and better blockchain that uses farming to leverage existing empty hard disk space distributed on nodes around the globe. Farming remains decentralized because anyone that has installed our software and has plots can win the next block. Mining requires expensive custom single use hardware and access to electricity at wholesale or better prices which only purpose built corporations can afford to mine. Farming is more decentralized because it relies on empty hard disk space and anyone with a mobile phone, laptop, or corporate network tends to have extra space not currently being used. Unlike mining, once you’re done farming your storage you can repurpose it to, for example, store your family photos.

Why do I want to farm Chia?

You can farm Chia on the unused storage space of your mobile phone, laptop, or corporate network and, in return, you have the chance to receive rewards in chia for helping secure the blockchain. Our software will allow you to allocate a certain amount of unused disk space to create plots. Since the only resource intensive step is the initial plotting, once you download the Chia node software, your drives will be plotted in the background. Once plotting is complete, your computer will begin farming on your behalf and the software does all the work and tracks your rewards for you. Ongoing farming uses very little network bandwidth and almost no resources other than storage. By making the farming process available to anyone with unused disk space, we are moving towards our goal of a truly decentralized blockchain that will also serve as a cross subsidy to the storage and cloud industry.

Farming will be the only way to obtain chia/XCH until it becomes listed on digital money exchanges.

What is the Chia Strategic Reserve?

Chia will pre-farm a large supply of coins at network launch to help stabilize and grow the Chia economy through Chia’s novel business plan of lending Chia.

Our Business Whitepaper has the details.

Why are we pre-farming?

Chia has a novel business model to both, lower volatility of the coin and increase adoption. By loaning Chia and managing the interest rates of those loans as well as other tools like buying our stock with chia coins, we hope to lower the quarter to quarter volatility of the coin. To drive adoption, we intend to loan Chia to Global 5000 companies who will use it to pay their international vendors quickly, less expensively, and more securely. We also intend to use the strategic reserve to aid development and adoption. We plan to do things like invest in promising startups in the Chia ecosystem, potentially increase farming rewards during limited periods of time to spur additional farming, and fund corporations paying 105% of the value of their international payables in Chia instead of fiat currency.

Is Chia doing an ICO?

No. Chia is not planning an ICO. Instead, our goal is to take the company’s equity public on an American stock exchange. This way, shareholders can share risk and return with management with transparency and disclosure and we can use well understood corporate controls to make binding statements about how Chia Network intends to use the Strategic Reserve. The Chia digital money is meant to be a useful payment instrument and not an investment opportunity. Chia intends to complete a fully compliant SEC registered equity IPO and will come to market as market-timing is amenable after the launch of mainnet.

Can I buy Chia today?

No. Once mainnet launches, we anticipate a six week period where only farming rewards are distributed by the network and transactions will not yet be allowed. This is to provide for a period to help stabilize the amount of space allocated to the Chia blockchain and to prioritize our space farmers. Additionally, release candidate farming software will be able to generate plots that will be immediately farmable on both testnet and mainnet at launch. Chia is likely to be available on most global exchanges after transactions begin on the mainnet.

How can I buy Chia?

After transactions begin on the mainnet, Chia will be available for buying, selling, and trading on most global exchanges from other chia owners.

When will Chia launch mainnet?

We will launch mainnet as soon as it’s done and are currently planning to launch on or before March 17, 2021. Software development is notoriously difficult to predict and the Chia blockchain and Chialisp are the first applied versions of a number of new discoveries in cryptography and computer science. Keep up to date here on our website, on Keybase, on Github, on Trello, and on our mailing list as we continue to release open source software and updates regarding our release plans. Updated release timing is usually available first in the Repository FAQ.

What is Chia’s inflation?

After the Chia pre-farm, Chia will offer farming rewards of 64 chia every 10 minutes. Over the first 12 years the farming rewards will be halved at the end of each 3rd year. From year 13 to infinity, the rewards will remain constant at 4 chia every 10 minutes leading to ever decreasing inflation rates. Chia’s inflation falls through the 0.50% rate 22 years after mainnet launch.

Are you writing code yet?

We are almost done with 1.0.

The Chia Blockchain comes together from a few different repositories.

RepositoryContentschia-blockchainConsensus code, networking, and reference Chialisp implementations.chia-blockchain-guiAn Electron/React graphical user interface to the plotter, node, and wallets.clvmChialisp Virtual Machine in Pythonclvm-rsChialisp Virtual Machine in Rust for security and performance.chiaposCreating plots and verifying Proofs of Space.chiavdfProofs of time/VDFs and Timelords.bls-signaturesIETF standard BLS-12-381 signature scheme.clvm_toolsTools for Chialisp and CLVM.

Isn’t the current international monetary system good enough?

No. Around the world, governments and banks cause problematic interactions that make banks difficult to trust, especially in volatile regions like Hong Kong, Venezuela Argentina or Lebanon. International payments, when they are available and work, are slow, expensive and insecure. International SWIFT wires often take 1-5 days. Correspondent banks often charge up to 3% and since the changes to banking since 9/11 and 2008, many countries have limited correspondent banks. International wire fraud losses are very large, and we have a better solution to mitigate these problems.

Does Chia use Bitcoin’s code?

No. Chia is written entirely from scratch.

Isn’t Bitcoin good enough?

When Bitcoin was developed, it was not foreseen that specialized hardware could vastly outperform the computers that everyone owns. What was intended to be a decentralized network is now controlled by a small number of miners with access to chip fabrication plants and wholesale electricity purchasing (or worse). The miners who currently control the Bitcoin Network feel they have a competitive advantage as is and oppose changing the protocol even when it’s clear that it should be changed. Chia has had ten years to study the new digital money ecosystem and believes we can make cryptocurrency more decentralized, more secure, and easier to use.

Is the value of Chia going to be as volatile as other cryptocurrencies?

We believe that Chia coins will be less volatile than other cryptocurrencies due to the planned nature of our planned public company status which will allow financial institutions to hedge and leverage coins and equity. Initially, we expect Chia Network to largely be valued based upon the valuation of the chia that the Company will hold on its balance sheet. Movements in the price of chia on digital exchanges are likely to be mirrored by price movements in the price of our stock on a stock exchange. There will be more ways to get exposure to the success of chia than traditional blockchain projects. This will also allow the usual options and derivatives to our stock to be used as something like a synthetic derivative for the price of chia coins. Additionally, our ability to use the Chia Strategic Reserve may reduce some volatility of chia in the market.

Why are you running these competitions?

We believe that more eyes on our code will only make it better. For example, the results of our VDF Competition produced a VDF implementation whose runtime was 80% faster than our original implementation.

Where has Chia advanced the state of the art in applied cryptography?

Chia has created three new core inventions and advanced the interest in, and adoption of, a fourth. Firstly, Chia created the first intended for production BLS Signatures library. Second, Chia will be the first production use of Verifiable Delay Functions, or VDFs. Third, Chia created Proof of Space and Time for Nakamoto consensus.

Finally, Chia will be the first production use of class groups of unknown order which has spawned significant new research into their applicability to cryptography.

Will the average person be able to use Chia as a payment instrument?

Our hope is that, over time, Chia will be supported by point of sale systems and consumer payment apps all over the world. For example, if you pay for a coffee at Tully’s in England with your GrabPay app from Thailand, it should “just work” without you needing to know it was paid in Chia.

Or, for example, if services like Venmo or Cash App aren’t available where you live, using Chia will be far less of a hassle than executing a slow and expensive wire transfer. Using legacy banking to send and convert cash across borders is cumbersome, slow and expensive, and while alternative money transfer services might be faster, they’re not cheap: Western Union can charge upwards of 10% in transfer fees.

The technology will be completely open source and accessible, and anyone will be able to build a new wallet without our permission or assistance. However, we intend to help wallet, exchange, and merchant processing partners with support and integration services, joint marketing and lending for liquidity.

Why are you named Chia?

We’re green money! Our founder Bram Cohen started the company knowing he wanted to reduce the energy dependence of blockchains through a “green” option. The concept of farming seemed to be the best metaphor for filling unused disk space and monitoring it for winning sprouts. This led us to look for a grain that had the properties we wanted to embody with our new Network. The team wanted a name that would be short and impactful. Everyone was amused that it was also a grain associated with a whimsical meme. Chia Network was born.

The ASIC Resistance of Proof of Space

A recent podcast speculated quite a bit about the economics of Chia Network’s new proof of space and time consensus algorithm.

Let’s discuss the assertion that there are optimizations in storage technology allow for the creation of specialized Chia farming hardware that costs an order of magnitude less than commodity disks.

Even if it were possible to make such advantaged specialized hardware, it would likely be unprofitable to purchase storage solely for the purpose of farming. There’s $140 billion in storage capacity sold every year and a large fraction of that is unused and can easily be made to farm for Chia. Because Chia farming rewards will be much less than the replacement cost of that storage, work difficulty adjustment will make the reward per byte per day be substantially less than the amortized price of new storage. But even if all Chia farming hardware were purchased specifically for that use we believe the margin between specialized and unspecialized hardware will be within a factor of 2, and will explain why below.

(Let’s set aside proof of time for now because that’s a different issue with a different set of dynamics and we are not at all claiming that there can’t be specialized hardware for that.)

Some ground rules: The characteristics of a storage medium are:

seek time,
read rate,
write rate
price per terabyte.

Higher layer functionality of the file system such as inodes and indexing are a layer above the underlying hardware. It’s possible with all storage media to get access to a raw partition but applications rarely do that because modern mass storage is so unbelievably huge that the overhead added by such functionality doesn’t make a material impact on performance.

Optimizing storage technology for bulk storage applications, Chia farming included, is dominated by price per terabyte. Any technology which could do better than commodity hard drives would be dominating already. Any new innovation which does better will successfully take over the whole storage market, not just Chia farming.

The amount of time for the network to farm the next block will be at least one minute and will average five minutes. The speed of finding a proof of space doesn’t matter as long as it’s less than a minute, but rapidly makes farming not worth doing if it takes much more than a minute. Even the ‘glacial’ lookup and ‘slow’ read times on hard drives are still way better than what’s necessary to stay under a minute.

A bit of a math interlude to justify this claim:

The way proofs of space are formatted on disk is in a series of 8 lookup tables. The actual number may be slightly larger or smaller than 8. We haven’t finalized the details yet but it will be a single fixed value. When a challenge arrives a farmer has to do 8 sequential seeks to find out how good a response they have to that challenge and if so they do the complete set of 2⁸ (256) lookups to generate the complete proof of space and then publish it to the network. For most lookups which result in a non-winning response eight lookups even at 20 milliseconds per lookup will hardly even be noticeable in terms of drive performance, and the rare 256 lookups will clock in at around 5 seconds, well under the minute budget.

Tape drives, on the other hand, have seek times which are far too long to be used effectively. LTO-8 is the current industry fastest tape standard and supports read speeds of 360 MB/s uncompressed. Proofs of space are random enough to not be very compressible. Thus to stay under the minute threshold one would only have about 21 GB per minute per tape read head to find your proof of space on each tape. LTO-8 drives appear to priced higher than $2500 per drive and the LTO-8 data cartridge is about $180 for a 12TB tape. LTO-10 may increase the total read speed by a little more than a factor of 3 to 1.1 GB/s but that still leaves you with only about 66 GB per minute and that standard looks to be a ways off. We’ve concocted a “frankentape” idea of multiple infinity spools of tape of a size of about ~20GB under the LTO-8 standard but the cost of retail tape drives is indicative that stripping out the read heads and the motors is still going to be pretty expensive as you’ve got to have the equivalent of ~ 49 read heads and motor pairs to get through one terabyte in less than a minute. You would probably also need a full time tape repair person.

In talking to hard drive manufacturers, the biggest optimization they point out is potentially eliminating the cooling fan. Proof of space otherwise uses almost all of the other core requirements of generalized storage. You can potentially use older and slower seek times or bus technologies, but to get the read density needed, you have to use state of the art read and write heads. The core issue is that the demand for cheaper mass storage that is almost hot storage but a bit slower is very high already. Spinning disk has mostly become that solution as large storage buyers and even desktop computers have used spinning disk to help scale out SSD.

For storage costs there are two price points that matter. The best price to store a terabyte online is Wasabi at $5/Tb/month. The cheapest drive we could find on June 4, 2018 at Amazon was $22.00 per terabyte for a Seagate 4TB drive before taxes and shipping (if any — thanks Prime!) Since Wasabi gets more expensive after about 18 weeks it’s pretty clear that ownership of the spinning drive is going to be the cheapest farming platform currently.

The most interesting alternative strategy that we’ve seen is write once blu-ray optical disc robots. A storage medium being limited to writing exactly once is less of a blocker for general purpose use than you might think, because that’s the usage pattern of a large fraction of all commercial storage and higher layer logic can be added to make such a thing look like a normal file system which happens to not free up space when you delete things and continues to lose empty space even when overwriting. Some ex-Facebook folks leveraged the near hot storage they’d created at Facebook to start a blu-ray robot storage company that Sony ended up acquiring. However it looks like Sony shelved the business shortly after acquiring it which doesn’t bode well for the technology. This is a potential optimization direction for pretty quick look up, write once optimization on proofs of space. But it is trading off the mass market scale of spinning disks for a new market of novel optical disk robots. They have to be quick to move through all the discs you’d want to read in the minute you have to find your best proof of space.

There is some truth to the general assertion that mass success of Chia could encourage storage innovations. The problem is that there isn’t (yet) an order of magnitude better way to store information. That puts the technology speculation out in the land of pure scientific discoveries. We are hard pressed to come up with a huge storage innovation that isn’t equally or more valuable to the buyers of the 585 million hard drives and SSDs expected to sell in 2018.

There are a few optimizations in response to Chia’s success that we might see in storage technology. Letting a farm co-exist underneath a RAID that’s otherwise in use for other valuable purposes could unlock a lot of unused storage space, especially if the farm is beneath the RAID’s redundancy. We do expect to see custom ASICs added to some drives (and maybe all of them) to make it easy to seed a farm. But those are technologies for allowing the spare capacity on existing storage to be more expediently used for farming, not exclusively for farming. It is also important to note that the speed that per terabyte prices are falling has slowed storage industry wide.

The primary attacks on proofs of space are algorithmic ones which use extra computational resources to get more rewards out of a fixed amount of space. Resisting those sorts of attacks is a major development focus for us and the subject of our Asiacrypt paper which we’ve since made further improvements upon. We’re also going to have a best implementation competition with real cash rewards in the future after we’ve published a specification. We feel confident that such efforts will quickly result in a plateau of rewards for a modest amount of computation and that any better trade-offs will require an infeasible cost prohibitive amount of computational resources.

Chia VDF Competition Guide

Chia Network recently launched a three month long competition to create faster implementations of our proofs of time and get a better handle on its security requirements. The Verifiable Delay Function Competition (VDF, aka proof of time) is open to anyone, has $100,000 in total prize money, and is running until January 3rd, 2019.

In the interests of making it as easy as possible to join the competition, this post gives an overview of the different tracks, as well as step-by-step instructions one how to submit an entry. The full details of the competition are available on our Github page.

Purpose and Explanation

The Chia consensus algorithm uses proof of space as its key resource. In order to create a secure consensus algorithm, however, proof of space is not enough. Attackers can grind on many possible solutions, or create a longer alternate blockchain, especially if they have a lot of computational power. To protect against these attacks, Verifiable Delay Functions are used to enforce real time between blocks. VDFs are deterministic functions which are non-parallelizable, and for which it’s possible to efficiently calculate short, easy to verify proofs. As long as an attacker can’t compute the VDF much faster than honest parties, the above attacks will not be practical.

The VDF that Chia is using is repeated squarings (likely verified with a Wesolowski proof, but that isn’t part of this competition). This must be done in a group, for which we’re using ideal class groups, which are explained in the class group document. Class groups are mathematical groups defined by their discriminant D, and they have a group operation (composition), and an element representation that consists of three integers (A, B, C). The repeated squarings VDF takes an generator g = (A, B, C), and performs the composition operation on itself for the required number of iterations.

So if the VDF requires 1,000,000 iterations, the algorithm would square/compose the input 1,000,000 times.

g = (A, B, C)

g² = (A, B, C) compose (A, B,C)

(g²)² = (A’, B’, C’) compose (A’, B’, C’)

…

… (1,000,000 iterations)

…

y = (Af, Bf, Cf)

Since the order of the group is not known, the squaring operation is believed to require all the squarings, as explained here. A verifiable delay function also needs to provide a short proof, so that verifiers can quickly check that it was performed correctly without running the intensive computation themselves. However, for the purposes of this competition, we only care about the output of the VDF, not the proof.

Track 1: Fastest VDF Implementation

Track 1 requires the competitor to efficiently evaluate N VDF iterations, given the discriminant D. The generator element g should be computed as:

g = (2, 1, 1-D/8).

Then, g should be squared repeatedly, N times, and the output, y, in reduced form, should be printed to stdout. The competitor that can output the correct element the fastest wins.

The discriminants used for Track 1 will be of size 2048 bits, so the numbers used in the composition algorithm will be large, and thus reduction is necessary. The discriminants are generated using the create_discriminant algorithm, which hashes to a random prime with certain properties, and then takes the negation. The discriminant can be assumed the negation of a prime p, where p % 8 == 7.

See sample entry 1 for an example of what an entry for Track 1 should look like. On the benchmark machine squaring a number the required 2097152 times (that’s 2²¹) in a group with a 2048 bit discriminant takes about 169 seconds. Presumably the winning entries will improve on that substantially.

The discriminants used for judging will be released at the end of the competition. The commitment to these discriminants is “2fe1e53289900911495b570a6ef9bed17b90a7eb02922631563fca641b83b8ef”

The discriminants can be generated, and the commitment verified, using the verification script. The number of iterations N will be 2²¹ = 2097152. The first place winner will receive $40,000, and the second place winner $20,000.

Track 2: Best Discriminant Break

The second track is about breaking the largest possible class groups. If one can find the order of an element in the class group, it might make the class group insecure. The order of the element is the smallest integer m such that e^m = identity. Track 2 requires competitors to find the order of any element in the class group other than the identity.

This should be easy to do for very small groups (small discriminant), but more and more difficult the larger the discriminant gets. 2048 bits (for Track 1) is likely an overly conservative choice allowing for more optimizations and higher cost of making custom hardware than necessary. The purpose of this track is to get a sense of the how large of class groups can be broken.

The competition requires the submission of 3 different seeds for create_discriminant(), and for each of those an element (A, B, C) and order (an integer specifying the order of that class group element). The smallest absolute value of the three discriminants is the final score. The exact specification is judge_entry.py.

See sample entry 2 for an example of what an entry for Track 2 should look like. The first place winner will receive $27,000, and the second place winner $13,000. New sample entries can be made using baby_giant_step.py, but there are much better known algorithms.

Steps for Participating

Both submissions and communications with the Chia team are done via Keybase (https://keybase.io/). After you install the Keybase application, we have two channels available in chia_network.public: #VDF_contest (for discussions related to the competition) and #general (for general discussions about Chia). To join, type in your terminal: keybase team request-access chia_network.public
Complete the Entry Form together with the signed version of VDF Competition Rules and Disclosures Agreement. In the case of team participation, each team member must complete both forms and all members must choose the same point of contact. The forms should be sent to Ali Shadle, either via Keybase (@ashadle) or via email (ali@chia.net).
After we check the registration forms, a private channel will be created for you or your team (chia_network.TEAM_NAME) with engineers from our Chia development team as participants. You can ask us questions regarding the competition there.
Each team can create shared Keybase Git repositories where code can be submitted. Here (https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone) are some instructions about using Keybase Git repositories.
Check out the vdf-competition Github repo to see explanations and sample code for class groups, as well as a sample submission for each track.
To participate in Track 1: Fastest VDF Implementation track, upload your files to a shared git repository under chia_network.TEAM_NAME. A sample entry can be found here. The folder must contain two files: **install.sh **and run.sh, which must both be executable, and start with “#!/bin/sh”. We’ll first run install.sh on our ubuntu test machine (specs below), which should resolve any dependencies, and compile the code. Then we’ll run run.sh, passing it two parameters: the discriminant in hex and the number of iterations, in decimal. The score of the entry will be the time used by run.sh to output the correct answer on our reference hardware. An incorrect answer will not be scored at all. The entry folder must also include a README file which describes the approach used.
In order to participate in Track 2: Best Discriminant Break track, upload your files to a shared git repository under chia_network.TEAM_NAME**. **The folder must contain a file called entry.txt, which should contain three lines, one line for each discriminant provided. Each line must contain six numbers, separated by a space: seed (in hex), length, a, b, c, and order. For scoring, the script judge_entry.py from the tools folder is used. The entry folder must also contain a file README which explains the approach used.
Only the last entry will be judged. At the end of the competition (after January 3rd), we’ll judge all entries from all the shared Keybase Github repositories and we’ll announce the winners.
For Track 1: Fastest VDF Implementation, we have deployed a system to run your entry on the reference machine and give feedback on how well it performed. You can use the VDF chat bot to run KeyBase git repo submissions on our reference hardware. You can test your results by sending the bolded message below to vdf_bot in your KeyBase private channel. vdf_bot will then report back to you the timing results or any errors that occur:
/vdf judge_speed keybase://team/chia_network.TEAM_NAME/entry
For Track 2: Best Discriminant Break, you can use the VDF chat bot to test your KeyBase git repo entry.txt format by sending the bolded message below to vdf_bot in your KeyBase private channel. vdf_bot will then report back to you whether it was evaluated successfully or any errors that occur:
/vdf judge_discriminant keybase://team/chia_network.TEAM_NAME/track2

Benchmark machine specs

Dell Inspiron 3670 64bit

i5 -8400 @ 2.8GHz

8GB ram

GPU: Geforce GTX 1060 3GB

For any questions, join us on Keybase: keybase team request-access chia_network.public, and join the #VDF_contest channel. We hope you participate!

Chia 1.0 Mainnet

Release version 1.0 of the Chia Blockchain.

You can go ahead and install it for Windows and MacOS with lots of other platforms supported too. You can continue plotting in 1.0 and otherwise prepare your farm while we wait for mainnet to start.

The genesis challenge will be distributed using our green flag process at 7AM PDT (14:00 UTC) on Friday March 19, 2021 and that will officially start mainnet! We attempted to chose a time that had the most waking hours around the globe. Apologies to Hawaii, the South Pacific, and eastern Australia etc.

We will have a Zoom and YouTube live available starting at 6:30AM PDT (13:30 UTC) on Friday March 19, 2021. During the RC9 green flag test on Tuesday, we caused Keybase to stutter but we will have room for 500 on Zoom and intend to post a direct YouTube live link. We will record, but may or may not post, the replay. Watching Devops press buttons may not be the high drama our Channel deserves. Comment, like, and subscribe and all that. We will be drinking coffee… ☕️

Zoom link - https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85969999199

There is an initial six week period where transactions will be frozen and farmers will only be receiving farming rewards. We will soft fork in final transaction capabilities during this period in a 1.1 release. That will be a required upgrade before the six week period ends. Read all about it in the release notes.

Happy Farming!

How and Where to Buy CHIA token ?

After transactions begin on the mainnet, Chia will be available for buying, selling, and trading on most global exchanges from other chia owners.

You will have to first buy one of the major cryptocurrencies, usually either Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT), Binance (BNB)…

We will use Binance Exchange here as it is one of the largest crypto exchanges that accept fiat deposits.

Binance is a popular cryptocurrency exchange which was started in China but then moved their headquarters to the crypto-friendly Island of Malta in the EU. Binance is popular for its crypto to crypto exchange services. Binance exploded onto the scene in the mania of 2017 and has since gone on to become the top crypto exchange in the world.

Once you finished the KYC process. You will be asked to add a payment method. Here you can either choose to provide a credit/debit card or use a bank transfer, and buy one of the major cryptocurrencies, usually either Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT), Binance (BNB)…

☞ SIGN UP ON BINANCE

Step by Step Guide : What is Binance | How to Create an account on Binance (Updated 2021)

The top exchange for trading in CHIA token is currently Huobi Global, OKEx, XT.COM, DigiFinex, and Bibox.

There are a few popular crypto exchanges where they have decent daily trading volumes and a huge user base. This will ensure you will be able to sell your coins at any time and the fees will usually be lower. It is suggested that you also register on these exchanges since once CHIA gets listed there it will attract a large amount of trading volumes from the users there, that means you will be having some great trading opportunities!

Top exchanges for token-coin trading. Follow instructions and make unlimited money

☞ https://www.bittrex.com
☞ https://www.poloniex.com
☞ https://www.bitfinex.com
☞ https://www.huobi.com

Find more information CHIA

☞ Website ☞ Source Code ☞ Social Channel ☞ Social Channel 2 ☞ Message Board ☞ Message Board 2 ☞ Coinmarketcap

🔺DISCLAIMER: The Information in the post isn’t financial advice, is intended FOR GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY. Trading Cryptocurrency is VERY risky. Make sure you understand these risks and that you are responsible for what you do with your money.

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I hope this post will help you. Don’t forget to leave a like, comment and sharing it with others. Thank you!

#blockchain #bitcoin #chia #chia network

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