Behind the first Czech Chia farm today are two tech enthusiasts, it fans, geeks of all kinds, gamers and completely normal fools Nexus and Maňas. We’ve been following cryptocurrencies since the beginning of their development and frankly we never found them to be globally beneficial, especially due to the form of the so-called “Proof of Work”. Burning large amounts of energy on complicated calculations in order to mine them never seemed efficient or interesting to us. So much for the history of BTC and similar currencies.

The new cryptocurrency Chia changes the established forms and approaches mining or in this case farming in a more ecological way. Changing the form to “Proof of Space and Time” leads to significant energy savings compared to the “competition”. Farming doesn’t generate as much waste heat and if you decide to close your farms and fields, you still have disk space that can be used for any other data. Plus, given the person of Bram Cohen, the man behind the BitTorrent protocol, who has learned from the mistakes of BTC and the miners' approach, he has finally created an interesting cryptocurrency project worth supporting.

The Czech Farm project and its web technology runs on a dedicated server (Ryzen 5 3600, 64 GB RAM) hosted by Hetzner in Falkenstein, see https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/. The actual master pool technology, the so-called backend, runs from 9/2022 in a brand new cluster (over 6 dedicated servers), which are located in Faster’s green datacenter see https://www.faster.cz/sluzby/data-centrum/ in geographically separated racks. The servers are fully redundant both physically, data and power. Only one of them is needed for the full operation of the Czech Farm pool. All servers run Debian see https://www.debian.org, all pool components use Docker technology see https://www.docker.com, the main orchestrator is kubernetes see https://kubernetes.io, the key master-master database for the pool data is Mongo see https://www.mongodb.com and monitoring data, statistics etc. is collected by https://prometheus.io.

In addition to the operation and maintenance of the pool, which we intend to plumb into technological limbo, we will also support farming. For the first months, we will provide Czech Farm with 3 independent plotters with a capacity of about 40 stogig plots per day, plus a disk array with a capacity exceeding 500 TB. We plan to expand the array further, depending on how well we all do on the farm.

Why Czech Farm pool? We have done large-scale Internet projects whose parameters (performance requirements, number of users, number of data transferred, number of servers, etc.) today exceed the needs of the Chia pool by a thousand times. We don’t see the Czech Farm project as work, but as fun, which has its added value and doesn’t have to bring profit at any cost (it is enough if the result is positive zero). We speak mainly Czech and we intend to help other farmers in the Czech field of modern JZD with our work :-)

Nexus & Maňas

P.S. Thanks to cryptocurrency mining, there are no globally available graphics cards and that’s a sad fact. And now thanks to the growth of interest in Chia, drives of all types of larger capacities both SSD and especially HDD (cheap disk space) may not be available soon. Every era brings its own and now it is clearly the turn of the disk manufacturers instead of the already financially satisfied graphics card manufacturers. We all wish none of this restricts us from farming!