If there’s one thing I’m good for, it is the latest Internet sensation.  I started paying with cryptocurrencies several years ago to play the CryptoKitties game, which was based on Ethereum.  Let me tell you, those were some expensive digital cats, and I didn’t bother playing it for very long.

This week, I started farming Chia on my old 2016 MacBook Pro.  Here’s everything I’ve learned along the way and what I’m using for my setup.

What is Chia?

Chia is a crypto currency that is mined, or in this case farmed, by using storage versus a GPU.  That reminds me, I mined some Doge back in the day that I should really take a look at.

If you’re a nerd like me, that means there’s a good chance you have everything you need, or almost everything you need to start farming.

Before you can start farming chia, you need to create your Chia plots.  This is probably the hardest part of being a Chia farmer since it is time intensive.

There are things you can do to speed up the time to make a plot, mainly being sure to use a fast drive, like a SSD.  You can also tweak other settings like memory and, and create plots in parallel (more than one plot at a time)

The finished size of a plot is 101.3 GiB (yes, GiB, thanks storage days, I never though this would come in handy) or 108.8 GB, but it requires 239 GiB of storage during the plot creation process, which is 256.6 GB of storage.

Now that you know the basics, let’s get into the details of what you need to farm Chia on a MacBook.

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What do you need to farm Chia on a MacBook?

First let me say that farming Chia on a MacBook probably isn’t the most ideal setup, but hey, it’s what I have.  The MacBook I am using is a 2016 15″ MacBook Pro with the 2.7 GHz i7 and 16 GB of RAM.  This MacBook has 3 USB-C ports onboard, and we’re going to use all of them.

Before you can farm your Chia you need to plot it.

There’s two main things you need besides your trusty MacBook:

• A fast drive for ‘plotting’ your chia.
• A cheap drive for storing your plots to farm.

Something to remember is that plotting Chia is something that its I/O intensive for your SSD.  It’s going to fry it over time. DO NOT use your internal MacBook drive for your temporary plotting directory.  Just don’t do it unless you want to fry your MacBook.

SSDs for Plotting Chia on a MacBook

I chose to get a 2TB NVMe drive and case to plot my Chia.  This is pretty much my bottleneck, since I’m limited by the speed of the USB-C port.

Here’s what you need for a SSD when it comes to plotting Chia with a MacBook.

I chose NVMe over SSD because of the speed, however it was a silly decision because I’m limited by the USB port speed and really can’t take full advantage of the NVMe.  However, this still worked out cheaper than a consumer grade 2TB SSD, and should last longer too.  If I burn it out, I can just swap the chip for a new one.

I also 2TB so I could plot more Chia in parallel, which I’m still trying to optimize for my MacBook to make the most out of time.  Early data is suggesting this may be overkill, but I went with the 2TB anyway since I may try this with other setups as well.

I’ve also linked to a 1TB NVMe M2 drive since that is probably fine for plotting with a MacBook and is less than half the cost of the 2TB.

That’s all I needed to get to get started.

Capacity HDs for Plotting Chia on a MacBook

When it comes to place to Chia on a drive to be farmed, anything will do.  You probably already have something laying around that you can use.  The more plots you can farm, the more chances you have to get some Chia!

Keep in mind we are limited by the MacBook here.  We only have 3 USBc ports, one for power, one for the SSD, and one for the Capacity drive.

I just used what I had laying around, which happens to be a 16TB worth of storage – which will be a lot of plotting.

You can buy an external hard drive packaged nicely, or a drive and adapter to USBc.  If you have some hard drives handy, you can get something like this, which will work with any 2.5″ or 3.5″ drive.

Plotting and Farming Chia

There are two main things when it comes Chia, plotting and farming.  Plotting is what takes the thinking and time and effort, farming just happens afterwards.

The first step is to download and install Chia.  When you launch it for the first time, it will walk you through setting up your wallet (a must for crypto).  Pay special attention to the 24 word phrase you are given, because that is the only way you can recover your wallet if needed.

Plotting is very straightforward through the GUI.

Leave the default plot size first of all.  For your first run, leave all of the defaults under step 2 for Choosing Number of Plots.

Step 3, Select Temporary directory should be your EXTERNAL SSD, not your MacBook’s SSD.

Finally, Step 4, Select final directory is your capacity disk.  Be sure you’ve the selected the right disks!

Chia plotting happens in a total of 4 phases, which you can read about here.  I highly recommend reading that guide to better understand how the process works.  The Chia UI has a progress bar to show you how far along you are with your plotting.

Once your plotting has finished, your plot will begin farming.  You don’t have to do anything, just keep on plotting!

Optimizing Your Chia Plotting

The first step is to plot a single plot of Chia, and figure out how long it takes.  Be sure to also open Activity Monitor on your Mac and see what is going on, and if you are hitting any bottlenecks.  Be sure to close out all other applications to free up as many resources as possible.  My MacBook uses 6GB of RAM just sitting there looking pretty.

This is important to keep an eye on so you understand how resources are used if you choose to plot in parallel later.

When your plot has finished, you can check the logs to see exactly how long each phase of plotting took.

The Chia logs are located in: ~/.chia/mainnet/plotter

Open a terminal and navigate to that directory.  Find the log you want and enter: cat logname | grep “Time” and you can see the amount of time each phase took in seconds.

I’m a total nerd and made an Excel spreadsheet with notes to see how long everything took, and track the optimizations I’ve made.

At this point, you can start to experiment.

Here are the advanced options for Step 2, Choose number of plots.

From here, you can begin to plot in parallel, and tweak the settings accordingly to see what the sweet spot is.

Disabling bitfield plotting is for old computers, it doesn’t apply to us here, and we want to make sure to put our plot in the final directory to free up or EXTERNAL SSD space, so ignore both those boxes.

Chia Plotting Results with 2016 MacBook Pro

Now, let’s get into what I’ve been seeing with my setup!

So far I’ve plotted:

• A single plot (9.1 hours)
• Two plots in parallel (14.1 and 14.4 hours)
• Three plots in parallel, with an hour delay between start times (pending, and was probably a bad idea, it is taking forever)

My next steps to tweak also are the RAM settings and to mess with the delay a bit more.  I’ll be sure to come back and update.

Single Chia Plot – 2016 MacBook Pro

Here’s some data on one of my single plots:

	Seconds	Minutes	Hours
Phase 1	14203.451	236.724183	3.94540306
Phase 2	7874.169	131.23615	2.18726917
Phase 3	9970.789	166.179817	2.76966361
Phase 4	741.426	12.3571	0.20595167
		TOTAL TIME	9.1082875

Not bad at all!

Parallel Plotting on MacBook – Two Plots

Here’s my data for the two plots I plotted in parallel with default settings

Plot 1	Seconds	Minutes	Hours
Phase 1	15297.677	254.961283	4.24935472
Phase 2	12296.915	204.948583	3.41580972
Phase 3	15847.149	264.11915	4.40198583
Phase 4	8854.874	147.581233	2.45968722
		TOTAL  TIME	14.5268375

Plot 2	Seconds	Minutes	Hours
Phase 1	15135.985	252.266417	4.20444028
Phase 2	12166.65	202.7775	3.379625
Phase 3	14042.09	234.034833	3.90058056
Phase 4	9668.497	161.141617	2.68569361
		TOTAL TIME	14.1703394

As you can see, we increased to about 14.5 hours to plot two plots.  This does save us some time if we were plotting on at a time.  I have a funny feeling two plots may be the sweet spot for the MacBook.

Parallel Plotting on MacBook – Three Plots

I started parallel plotting three plots, with an hour delay between each start.  It seems like it was a terrible idea.  

This was after almost 12 hours.  Yikes!  Stay tuned for an update to my final times for this run.

Are you plotting with a MacBook?  Let me know how it goes!