A Day with ChainGreen – My thoughts on the fork

A quick update on ChainGreen farming. It’s not all there yet. Not by a long shot. The TLDR is that you shouldn’t bother. Not yet at least.

The ChainGreen team has been dealing with a number of issues associated with their blockchain, Yesterday there was a possibly malicious actor who was delaying updates to the blockchain. There was also a hard fork to increase the difficulty updates, because the original values were set so easy that too many blocks were being signed. It is starting to look like that hard fork has also created issues, with 2 ChainGreen blockchains on the network now and even worse the old one is at a higher height.

I have been running ChainGreen for almost 2 days now, and I have yet to properly sync to the network. I have definitely not uncovered a block. At the start, it was just like Chia – i spent my time syncing my full node and plotting a few plots. I plotted out 8. Pointlessly it turns out.

I had hoped to have a long writeup about the pros and cons of a forked blockchain vs the Chia Project but from what I can tell the only reason you would run ChainGreen seriously is to give yourself a reason to feel grateful to the Chia dev team. Running the Proof of Space and Time blockchain is quite clearly a lot harder than it looks. The variable tuning and testnet work that Chia Network has been undergoing for the last few years was apparently not for nothing.

Another issue I have uncovered is that even though there was no prefarm because of the low difficulty and high reward structure selected the very early adopters (developers) were able to rapidly farm the beginning of the blockchain before anyone was really aware of the project. So yes, there is no prefarm in the same way as Chia, but the developers still control a significant amount of coin if there was to be some sort of price explosion.

Of course there wont be, because as of right now their network is not functional. For now my recommendation is to not bother with ChainGreen. I will be keeping an eye on it, so watch this space to see if there are any improvements but for now it seems like a bust. And definitely do not add your normal Chia private key to this application until we know exactly what is going on.