A question about Chia farming that I am seeing a lot on reddit and discord right now is why after so many months of not finding any proofs are we suddenly finding a number of them constantly but still aren’t winning any blocks. So what gives? Is everything working correctly?
Yes.
What is happening there is how the on-chain pooling protocol developed by Chia Networks works. The way you prove your participation in the pool, and how you indicate how many plots you have, is by delivering what are known as “partial proofs” to the pool servers.
What is a partial proof? It is a very low difficulty proof to the challenge. This should be achievable by each plot you own multiple times per day, as opposed to a full proof which will take many years per plot at current difficulty. These low difficulty proofs, once delivered to the pool servers, generate points for you and are used to determine payout. Sadly there is no way in the GUI to determine if you are finding full proofs to potentially win a block or finding partial proofs to submit to the pool, but if you have your logging level set to INFO in your config.yaml file you will see the following lines in your logs that will tell you what’s going on.
This is perfectly normal behaviour and should not concern you. Sadly even in version 1.2.3 there isn’t any visual indicator on whether you are winning a block or just business as usual. This tripped me up at first when checking out the new pooling protocol.
