Category Archives: Money Pit

What to do with your Evergreen farming rig

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See bottom for an update on Evergreen Mining as of 2025-03-23, and another as of 2025-05-11. The project is shutting down on 2025-05-23. Stable farming rigs will continue to work, but the app will not, and no updates will be made to the software on your rig.

tl;dr: Evergreen is having issues. If you have issues with your farmer or app and want to head in another direction, you can set up your own farmer using Spacefarmers community node or your own full node, or you can reuse your drives for other things.

Also, you can use the official Chia software in wallet-only mode, along with the keys/mnemonic from the app, to transact your farmed Chia (it’s not “in the app” or held in any way by Evergreen).

Also, this post is a work in progress, as I want to get the info out there before everyone sets their EVG rigs on fire.

Finally, if this helps and you want to throw me a donation, https://ko-fi.com/robnovak is there. Completely optional, but it helps my coffee stash and my motivation.

As you’ve seen over the last couple of years, I’ve written about the Evergreen “miner” for Chia. It was designed as a turnkey farmer where you buy pre-plotted drives and run them with a low power single-board computer “hub.”

Evergreen was a good low-effort way to get into Chia farming, and while the price was at a premium over what you could build on your own (see my original Evergreen post for a dated example), for people who couldn’t or just didn’t want to invest the time (and some expense) into building and maintaining/managing their own farm, it was a valid option. I personally have a single-drive 12TB rig under my television and it’s spent most of its life doing what it’s supposed to. (I did get a $100 coupon for it as a promotion when I bought the gear almost two years ago, but I have never been compensated for writing about Evergreen, and they have no say in what I write.)

In the last six months, though, support responsiveness has been low, visibility of the leadership team has been mostly non-existent, and a lot of farmers have been stuck in extremely high latency support ticket loops. As I finish up this post on Saturday afternoon (March 8, 2025), it’s been over a week since either of the visible members of the Evergreen team have posted anything on Discord.

I don’t fault the support team (Jakub) for this, having been the one support person for many organizations, including crypto pools, before. But with a recent Chia day-zero type bug fix causing a flurry of panic around the closed Evergreen software platform, the Android app disappearing from the app store, along with a public conflict between the founder (and his girlfriend) and the person responsible for the software and farmer software… a lot of people are concerned about the future of the project, and people who are stuck with hardware or software issues wonder if they have expensive paperweights.

I hope that Dylan and Evergreen are able to recover and get support ramped up and the open issues resolved soon. But given that a lot of people are considering just shutting down their gear if a problem comes up, I am providing some suggestions on how to deal with the discomfort around your Evergreen farmer.

It should be painfully obvious, but this is in no way an official, endorsed, approved, or even reviewed statement from Evergreen. It’s just a guy who’s about up to 4 years in Chia trying to help the community out. And if you take any of this advice, it’s all on you with regard to the outcome. Should be pretty clear, right?

Easy button: Just let it keep farming

If your Evergreen gear is still working, submitting partials, and getting payouts, you should feel free to just let it run as long as it works. I expect based on the support volume on their Discord that most farmers are in this category.

For any of the following options, there is absolutely no official support, and you take full and complete responsibility for any change you make to the gear you bought from Evergreen. I will not provide any support either. Proceed at your own risk.

NUC5I5 mini-PC, suitable for a community node farmer or a full node farmer (with a 500GB or larger NVMe drive for the blockchain database). It should cost you less than US$100 used.

Semi-easy button: Connect to a mini-PC and load your keys

If you have a mini-PC, a Raspberry Pi, or even a spare desktop or laptop that can run Linux, you can relatively easily set up your plotted drives on your own instance of the Chia software. This should be a computer you can leave on all the time, hence the focus on low power. And you need Linux because the hard drives use the Linux ext4 filesystem (if you have a way to access them on another OS, you probably didn’t need this post).

Some possible options for your replacement farming PC (not my listings, but they are affiliate links and I may receive a commission if you buy through these links):

I would suggest a minimum of a 5th gen Intel Core processor (i5/i7), 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD for use with community node or 512GB SSD for running your own node. Most of these machines can be upgraded afterward. You’ll also need a USB flash drive of at least 16GB to put the Linux installer on.

You can run a farmer with or without node on a Raspberry Pi 4 or later, although you may not be saving a lot of money and you’re giving up a lot of expansion and growth capability.

You just need to install Chia software or MadMax’s Gigahorse software (the latter is required if you’re using compressed plots, or if you plan to make compressed plots), set it up for the Spacefarmers community node, get the mnemonics off your plotted drives (see below), and configure your farmer to farm the plots on your external hard drives.

Each plotted drive should have a preload.pconf file that contains your mnemonics and addresses. Don’t modify it just in case. It isn’t used by standard Chia software. And note that these sample addresses and mnemonics are invalid. Don’t try using them, you’ll get errors.

{
"mnemonic": "chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
",
"first_address": "xch1xxxxcx3xx333xx3x3xccx3xx3xxxxxhx3xxcxxxxx0c3xx3xgxxxxxxx3",
"contract_address": "xch1xxxxcx3xx333xx3x3xccx3xx3xxxxxhx3xxcxxxxx0c3xx3xgxxxxxxx3",
"payout_address": "xch1xxxxcx3xx333xx3x3xccx3xx3xxxxxhx3xxcxxxxx0c3xx3xgxxxxxxx3",
"launcher_id": "q3s3n3qsp33q333o3r3333pn333o3qn3333q333333ro3r333r3qsrn3rq33333r",
"worker_name": "Evergreen_v1"
}

You use the ‘chia keys add’ command to add the mnemonic phrase shown in your files, so that your chia system can recognize your plots as yours. The “-l” parameter puts a label on the key.

This labeling is optional, but good for keeping track of multiple keys, especially if you have multiple Evergreen drives..You probably have to do this once for every Evergreen-plotted drive.

chia@chianuc5:~/chia-gigahorse-farmer$ ./chia.bin keys add -l chicken
Enter the mnemonic/observer key you want to use: chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken

You could even install Linux (Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu probably) on a new 32GB MicroSD card and use the existing “hub” as your new farmer. This method also means that if your issues with Evergreen are resolved, you can just swap back in and run normally.

Note that you should start the chia wallet as well, let it get synced (via ‘chia wallet show’), and once that’s done, your farming should work. This bit me, with almost a day of “plots were eligible for farming” but no proofs. On average, a 12TB Evergreen drive with 109 plots should get 1090 points a day, or a point every 80 seconds on average, so if you don’t see proofs in the logs, check the wallet sync. Once your wallet is synced and you’re finding proofs, you can stop the wallet and reduce load on the community node.

If you have the compressed C29 plot option with remote compute, you would need a machine with a fairly modern GPU available for the compression. This is not a huge barrier, as most gaming PCs can handle this load, as well as other machines with a reasonably sized NVIDIA GPU (probably with 6GB or more of VRAM). But it is a bit more complicated, and beyond what I’ll cover here. If your new farmer has a NVIDIA GPU, it should just work.

This method also means that if your issues with Evergreen are resolved, you can just swap back in and run normally.

Scorched earth method: They’re Just Hard Drives

While there’s some proprietary magic to the Evergreen Hub mostly around software, the rest of the rig is just USB external hard drives. You can always connect them to another machine and replot over them, or reuse them for other things (backing up your NAS, etc).

Sketchy option: Sell your rig

This one isn’t something I would recommend, and I wouldn’t be comfortable selling a rig I was decommissioning for the reasons currently floating around Evergreen’s platform. But if you find someone who wants the gear and understands the issues, or who just wants the components, you could probably sell it. You can’t get your purchase price back, I’m pretty sure, but you can recover some shelf space and get a bit of cash out of it.

Where do we go from here?

I unplugged my Evergreen node, since it got quirky recently and I haven’t had the inclination to troubleshoot it myself. The drive is now connected to a NUC5i5RYB mini-pc I picked up at a flea market this morning (March 9) for about $40. I upgraded it from a 256GB SSD to 1TB because I had one around and may want to run a full node on it, but without the full node, even 128GB is more than enough.

Pro-tip: For your new farmer rig, if you choose to use one, make sure to set it to power on after power loss. I forgot that when setting up my NUC5i5, and my former-Evergreen rig was offline after some weather-related power outages at home. With Raspberry Pi or the like you shouldn’t have to do this. With most PC-type solutions, you probably do.

I hear that there will be some updates coming from the Evergreen team soon, as the support guy is back and responding again.

Update as of May 12, 2025.

Dylan of Evergreen Miner has made an update post to the Evergreen Discord.

In short, remote services will end on May 23, 2025. There will be no more official support, although that has been the case for two months now anyway.

If your rig still works, it will continue to farm and earn XCH as before.

There is a replacement OS being developed by a group called Druid Garden (including former Evergreen folks) to keep the gear running mostly as it is today.

You can sell your drives on eBay (my guess is $10/TB in good condition), reuse them for your own purposes (Chia or not) as noted above, or Dylan has a form to connect with liquidators. This is (imffho) more relevant to larger farmers – liquidators will probably not bother with one or two drives.

Dylan doesn’t call this out, but if you have not already done so, GO INTO YOUR APP AND GET YOUR MNEMONIC/SEED PHRASE so you can access your wallet even if the app dies.

Update as of March 22, 2025.

I haven’t watched the videos about the downfall of Evergreen, but on the EVG Discord today, Dylan, the founder of Evergreen, said he has no ability to do anything with Evergreen.

I asked him to make a more clear and centralized announcement, but for now it looks like the odds of the service restoring customer support, RMAs, or fulfilling any orders that have not already shipped are pretty close to zero.

So see above, and if you’re interested in a video on the process, or even a more step-by-step blog post on the cutover and/or the GPU remote compute, let me know in the comments.

And I’ll be posting another blog soon with some farmer/plotter designs for 2025, including the machines I personally use today for both purposes. So stay tuned.

As always, if you buy through eBay, Amazon, or some other links on my post, I may earn a small commission.

Quick Take: Is It Too Late To Get Into Crypto?

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Short answer: Maybe. But read on.

In January 2021, I refreshed my involvement with cryptocurrency mining, after two years of Ronco-mode Ethereum mining. Set it and forget it worked pretty well, except when a power supply died.

I started a post then, and had told some friends about my calculations for Ethereum mining with the new 30-series from NVIDIA or even my old RX580 cards. A $1500 rig that could pay for itself in six months? Amazing.

But in the week or two after I said that, as James Burke might say, the universe changed. Or at least the crypto and GPU world started to transmute in strange ways.

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Chia update and frequently answered questions

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Just 15 days ago, I posted a somewhat quick introduction to Chia farming as well as a quick guide to Chia hardware starting points and, a few days later, a step-by-step build of the Intel NUC 10th gen plotter inspired by chiadecentral. Today I posted the start of a Frequently Ungoogled Chia Questions post that I will add to over the coming weeks.

I expected a few dozen people in the Telegram chats I was in to read it, and some Tech Field Day cohorts, and a few random bots on Twitter. 

Well…

50000 airplane banner by Dake via Wikimedia Commons

Over 50,000 readers later, I’m pretty shocked. In fourteen days it surpassed the former leaders, Cisco UCS for beginners – an end-user’s overview and Five fun and useful uses for an extra PCI slot, to become the most read post in my site’s 10 year history.

Lots of comments have shown that it was useful and provoked interest and thought, as well as showing that not everything was fully covered in that post and its follow-ons (hence the new Frequently Ungoogled Chia Questions post). 

And a lot of you were kind enough to use my affiliate links to buy your Chia gear (and some other things I’m sure), for which this between-jobs blogger is grateful. 

What’s new, Chia-cat? Whoa, whoa whoa…

Since those posts came out, Chia transactions went live a week ago, with a peak price on some exchanges of around US$1500 per XCH and a current price of around US$1000 (as I type this). (Click the link or the image for current charts from CoinGecko.)

The world of Chia will become more interesting next week when the pool protocol and design come out from Chia HQ. Like other crypto pools, this development will make it possible to spread out work and rewards more evenly than solo mining/farming. 

It is not expected to end solo farming, which is what has been going on since mainnet opened in March. So if (like me) you’re plotting and farming already, you can keep those plots up and available for another few years and hope for more rewards. 

How’s your hardware going?

Robert's primary chia farming gear

From left to right: Dell Precision T7910, cheap EMC and Dell SAS arrays for supplemental storage, Dell precision T5810

You may remember from my original post that I’m running Chia on my Ryzen 5 3600 desktop (not pictured), a T7910 beast workstation (pictured above), and a T5810 mini-beast (pictured above). Last week I built a NUC-based plotter, and except for filling up the stopgap slow storage drives, and maybe running a little bit warm, it’s worked pretty well so far. 

I’ve taken a liking to the Micron P420m PCIe flash cards, although they’ve become more scarce lately. These are PCIe 2.0 x8 cards that may be branded Micron, EMC, or HP, with 700GB or 1400GB of storage, and write endurance of 9000 and 18000 TBW respectively…

if you have the spare slots, cards like these are pretty good, and while they’re not photonics-speed, they’re quite fit for purpose. Consider other brands, and check with the seller for any details on SMART or other lifespan monitoring data available. A couple of mine had apparently never been powered up before, but a member of our Telegram chat got one that was a lot closer to demise. 

If you can’t find the affordable PCIe cards, datacenter-class SSDs are always showing up, for as low as $200 for a 1.6TB drive (good for 5 plots) . And as mentioned in a previous post, if your motherboard supports PCIe bifurcation, there are several 4x NVMe cards available to get your high speed storage right on the bus. 

Where do we go from here?

Send your questions in if you have something not answered on the posts so far. I’m thinking about a NUC build video, as I have an older one that’s almost identical in build, so if you think videos or other topics would be good to see. 

I’ll be trying to consolidate storage this week, and upgrading the T5810. Right now I have 40+ TB of underutilized space in my SAS arrays, and some 12TB white label drives to test out and put into use. 

Frequently Ungoogled Chia Questions

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This critter came in over the weekend. We’ll see if Hello Kitty grows chia faster than my rigs.

I’ve written a couple of Chia posts in the last week, and it looks like a lot of readers have benefitted from them.

There are still a lot of questions, many of them repeated, that people aren’t gleaning from the other posts. I’ll try to gather those here and update this page more often than the others. This will be somewhat freeform, so feel free to search this post or the blog in general for your answers, and if you have a new question, ask it here and I’ll see what I can do.

I will try to organize the questions and answers to make them easier to follow. For now, this is as-I-think-of-them so you may want to browse or use search to find your questions.

Note that I can’t do hardware audits, basic Linux or Windows admin training, or investment advice of any sort on this site. As with any crypto adventure, don’t spend more than you can afford to lose or repurpose, and don’t expect me to talk you into or out of any particular crypto efforts.

As a side note, no, the acronym was not intentional, but it’s relevant when I hear some of these questions. Thanks for asking.

Now on to the questions…

Updated: 2021-05-13 9pm PT

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Building the Intel NUC Chia Plotter

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In an earlier post, I shared a design for a Chia plotter/farmer based around the Intel NUC NUC10i7FNH tiny computer.

Today I built that machine, and it’s running its first plot as I type this.

If you landed here, you might be interested in my other recent Chia posts:

Pricing disclaimer: All prices, availability info, and links are accurate as of the writing of this article (May 3, 2021) unless otherwise noted. Prices vary from day to day and availability does too. Use this info with a grain of salt especially if you are reading this in 2022 or beyond.

Here’s a quick rundown of what was involved in the process.

Shopping List

Feel free to shop in your preferred venues online or locally, or if you already have components, use them. These links are Amazon affiliate links, and if you use them, I get a few bucks to go toward my next hardware adventure. (I bought my NUC and RAM from Central Computer, a local computer store in Silicon Valley, and the NVMe drive came from Amazon.)

Base computer – NUC10i7FNH1 currently $570 at Amazon. You want the i7, and you want the FNH which is the “high” case that holds a 2.5″ drive as well as the m.2.

RAM – 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 2666 or better SODIMM. Crucial 16GBx2 kit around $182 at Amazon. You can install 64GB, but you probably don’t need it with this processor.

Boot drive – I used a Samsung PM851 that’s not available on Amazon at the moment. Any 2.5″ SATA drive will do, even a HDD. Amazon has the WD Blue SSD 250GB for $45 or 500GB for $60. If you have something else on hand that’s at least 120GB, go ahead and use it, or if you want some internal plot storage, get something bigger. 

Plotting drive – 2TB Inland Premium NVMe is popular with its 3200TBW rating, about $240 on Amazon but out of stock for the next week. If you watch your drive life, you can use cheaper NVMe or even SATA m.2 storage. But check the TBW (Total Bytes Written, or Terabytes Written) and warranty for your drive and take that into account. 

OS install drive – Get a USB 3.0 drive with 16GB or more space, and use Balena Etcher or Rufus to burn Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to it.I like the Sandisk Ultra 32GB for price point and quality, about $10 at Amazon. 

External long-term plot/farm storage – I’ll be using an 8TB external drive in the near term, but you can use whatever you have, even NAS storage. 

Bonus: Staging disk. A user on r/chia suggested using a staging drive to copy your final plot file to, so that your plot process ends faster than if it has to be copied to slow disk. You can then automate moving the plot files to your external HDD at your leisure, and get back to plotting again up to an hour faster. For this, you can use an external USB 3.0 or better SSD like the WD My Passport SSD ($150 for 1TB), Crucial X8 ($148 for 1TB), or pretty much any SSD that will hold a batch of your plots (1TB will hold 9 plot files). You can also use a directory on your NVMe drive for this, but make sure you don’t let it fill up.

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