Like many others, the episode of Modern Finance is what turned me onto chia. Background in software development, design, and the whole crypto thing was way over my head when it started to go a bit more mainstream. However, this time around I’m in and learning.
I started on my gaming machine when mainnet went live. Bought two 4TB drives I put in and then added a 18TB external and a new temp SSD. I’m up to 65 plots and now XCH to show for it, but hey, it’s exciting.
I am here because of Jeff (Coding Horror).
It is all his fault for posting a small thread on the forums at boingboing.net about his early chia farming efforts. I ran across it a couple of weeks ago and fell down a hole!
Network Engineer, Heard of it from Linus Tech Tips. ALways liked the Idea of Burst but found it WAY to complicated to figure out. Heard about this Chia think and in less then 30 minutes I had it started and plotting.
Sorry… not sorry? 
Adam Black is Satoshi, or if he’s not, there’s substantial evidence that just happens to point to the wrong cypherpunk.
Most of the Satoshi speculation is poorly researched, this however is well done: https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g
ty for sharing my video I was going to write a response on the post, but I dont want people to think i am just promoting myself in here… you are truly kind. ty for the support.
I actually found out about chia through an Unraid support post awhile back – a guy asking for help with Unraid who somewhere along the way explained what he was trying to do with it… I realized that wasn’t likely a great use case for Unraid, but then went down this rabbit hole and what a rabbit hole it was… For me personally the most profitable part of chia has been the journey itself. I’ve learned a lot and i already have an IT background – which really made me appreciate this whole thing that much more (and kick and scream a bit along the way)
My background is actually in big data generated from cancer genomics. I am a network architect for a pretty large business and i generally help with moving big data around… which is maybe why this was so interesting to me 
it really turns into a challenge of moving big data once you get to a certain point and that is just fun. I do a lot of side projects for network visibility (Elastiflow) which I also run at home… if any of ya’ll is interested I highly encourage you to go check it out – visualizing the chia network with an open source passive monitoring tool is really neat not to mention it feels good from a security perspective knowing what’s going on within your network (home or work…)
BROO those data visualizations are AWESOME! CHIA is/has been a wild ride no doubt.
RIGHT?? My local network was perfectly content at 100mpbs for some 11 years until CHIA. I upgraded my switches to Gigabit and now I’m looking into 10Gbe. I’ve gone through the whole 10 year enterprise migration in like 6 months!! 
I am a 43 year old dentist, always been into tech, had a ZX Spectrum+1 as a 4 year old, then BBC master compact, loads of consoles, then bought a PC aged 18, have done a lot of 3D printing, started a 3D printer sensor company, bought 4 BTC in 2013 for £1200 then sold it in 2014 for £2400 and figured I had done okay. Of course had I held it, a month ago it would have been worth £158000.
So determined to not miss out on Chia, given that it’s much less harmful than bitcoin, it could really take off, it’s having an encouraging start, the net growth is both concerning and encouraging in equal measure.
Great forum here, really enjoying it so far. Spent too much time on FB where a lot of other posters are not so great.
Right now I’m a Product Manager at a IT Managed Services company specialized on the Microsoft stack (focussing on Microsoft 365 and Azure).
Before that I did systems engineering for private/hybrid-clouds, again on the MSFT stack (Storage Spaces, Hyper-V up to System Center Virtual Machine & Service Manager) and was mainly automating things with PowerShell.
I got in contact with Chia just a week or two before mainnet launch. I literally got shilled by some random guy in a discord server. And I was hooked to it from the start. Initially I thought: “Oh well boy, you wanted to mine BTC back in the day when It got launched, but people talked you into that this will never be profitable and you believed them! Don’t do the same mistake again!” So without talking with anyone I know about Chia, I just went off.
I really loved the exploration phase (me exploring Chia), getting to know what Chia is and what it’s not and how to tune my system to plot faster. As I was frustrated with the available tooling, I decided to ramp up my ow Plot Manager that I can fire up and forget. When I realized that there is no similar tooling on PowerShell available, I created my first ever public GitHub Repo.
So for me Chia was really a big journey up to this point. And I like it. Regardless of how many XCH I do not have 
Not for certain, but there is a compelling case to be made for Adam Back.
EDIT:
Also found an compelling case against that theory.
Somewhere mid April I sstarted playing around with crypto and GPU mining, just to learn more about it. I probably heard of Chia from some Youtube crypto channel mentioning it.
From an optimization game point of view Chia is more interesting than GPU mining as a lott more parts of the system are in play and can influence performance than in the GPU world where it is basically under/overclocking the card.
So you could say Chia is the better crypto MMORPG with more depth in the mechanics. The only thing in Chia that is a bit of a turnoff for me is everything else besides the optimization game. I don’t think the company producing the game respects the players at all.
My background is in Product and Marketing. Mostly in gaming . Currently I’m CEO of an iGaming startup (Mobile Poker Game).
I got interested in Chía while researching an alternative to BTC from an environmental stand point.
regular Joe. 2 kids… really really believe chia and its protocol.
will change the future of the internet forever, as bittorent did.
a few weeks before mainnet. I fell in love with some old servers…hadnt touched a computer in 10 years… than I randomly met a crazy crypto guy by accident… he gave me 1 word. chia. he was rich… drove a Denali with a electric generator in his trunk he used to run a computer to test graphics cards on the go… I was hooked. and i had a unique angle to implement…somthing I used for many Minecraft servers on my 1 network…
I like big SSDs and have been into crypto for years. Was Hard to miss all the trouble about Chia. Also had ike 40 FREE HDD bays AT home.
PS: Elon Musk owes me a lot of money…
I’m an IT professional and PC enthusiast. I was dabbling in Eth mining to try to offset the cost of the GPUs I needed for other purposes and got a little hooked, so naturally I started looking around for other interesting opportunities. I took a peek at Chia early on but the OG plotter requirements were hard to swallow—for a variety of reasons—and I was skeptical of the win probability. Fortunately, madMAx came along and enabled me to utilize my existing VFIO workstations for plotting, and then the official pooling protocol came along, so here I am.
I already had an 18-bay fileserver and standalone 4- and 6- bay enclosures at home, so startup costs have been fairly reasonable: a RAM upgrade (that I had planned to do anyway), the cheapest 220+GiB Optane drive I could find, and HDDs. I’m definitely kicking myself for how many SAS JBOD offers I’ve turned down over the years but c’est la vie. I’ve been keeping an eye out for good disk shelf deals in Chicagoland but prices are nuts right now as I’m sure you’re all well aware. I’m still plotting my first 100TB so it hasn’t been a problem yet.
My only real regret is that I let those OG plotter requirements scare me off in the beginning. Now that I’m seeing what folks have been able to accomplish with old/slow computers plus stripes of cheap HDDs plus lots of time… I could have easily been doing that all along. I’m also shocked by how much extended life folks are wringing out of cheap NVMe SSDs with supposedly finite write endurance. Anyway, hopefully I didn’t completely miss the boat!
Don’t worry, Chia is still in its infancy
I was into Burstcoin but quickly figured out that since issuance was almost completely done, and developers had all the coins, it was not going to improve because the incentives weren’t lined up properly. I discovered Chia when Kevin Rose asked for recommandations for Bram’s project when it poped in my feed.
Owned a computer/network consulting company before retiring. Focus was on SSD upgrades for clients from when they 1st appeared. Missed a few years’ tech advances while enjoying other passions, but then saw crypto as major in the world of finance, so began a concerted effort of learning about it. As I got toes in crypto investing some, saw story on the internets of chia going mainnet. Thought, "I can do that!! I know how to do that stuff, and It could be fun!
Hah! I didn’t know near enough (about plotting/farming) to do it well, but it’s (so far) super fun learning, buying, building, and now sitting on my chia plot stash.
And hey, one day it may stop losing me money hand over fist!
Looks like we are all old timers 
Gosh where to start , a 32 years ago when I was an 18 years old I did a PC Privé project sold then over a 1000 Hyundai 386SX 16mhz 2Mb mem and 40 MB HDDs though had to replace all seagate drives to connor slim ones as the seagates where faulty, now that was day/night job with barely sleep.
Profit margin was a minimum as it was a group buy but I couldn’t complain especially at the age of 18…needless to say profit went into a BMW 318i convertible … and well barely anything left as I managed 6 months after to hit a tree that made it a total loss (learned also that trees on gov streets cost money if you hit them lol)
I then went to Univ, maths option Informatica (IT didn’t existed yet) at the KUL to get a license degree which is now present day called a master … during that time I played as co-sysop for the Pioneer BBS (yea still BBS stuff not the internet, and my pay was a fancy devlonics 9600 bps modem the lenght of a motherboard, comparable to the big quaddro vid cards present day, doesn’t fit anywayre) and weekends worked as a job student at a small corp called VPC , mainly delivering and setting up the systems for retail customers.
After that… started a consulting company re informatics (still not IT) and marketing, my main was creating catalogs for customers on cd-rom as an order system written in clipper s87 that well used zmodem as protocol.
I really liked Nantucket Clipper s87, was even possible to compile back then. So custom jobs could be done and tons of tools for s87 available left and right… remember that’s the time people used wordpress, db III/IV, etc
Now , sadly to say but earning a tad to much at a young age ain’t that good … so I went bankrupt , going out/alcohol influence falling for gold diggers … etc … oh well my own fault
So worked left and right but after you have been your own boss it’s difficult to adjust …
1998 or so I stumbled on e-gold, now that was a pleasant change, but addoption was low , still centralized and filled with scam artists … 2003 went bankrupt again due to a 250k USD stolen from my accounts… I still think that stuff is inside job e-gold but well who to tell, at least the FBI closed it and kinda confiscated all funds remaining …
Around 2005 went into marketing for the online game sector, totally new but had a course done by the Group Bertelmans about sales (TV stations, magazines, etc , big media corp) so that helped … note all freelance.
And based on contracts back then, some game corps still pay me present day monthly some partner earnings. Which made me a bit more financial free.
So I can’t complain for doing nothing… thanks to partner earnings, not super amounts but makes it all a tad more comfy.
Due to the bit of financial freedom, I looked into cryptocurrency main thought was crypto to use as game currency and portable to other games of the same corp, which I tried to be an advocate for. (GGS, Innogames, GameForge, Plinga etc…)
But that failed, none interested and still not really… so I sticked with writing articles left and right for some corps on a freelance base and that’s it … still a good paying sector
Anyway invested in some cryptocurrencies, mined, staked etc … wondering if some remember some oldies like PPC, BLK, etc that had a form of staking …
I also started a small non profit project a couple of years ago to help homeless people get back on track. Now how to get homeless people back on track , that’s simple give them access to the information highway aka the internet. So I started refurbishing old laptops and sell them (yes sell) to homeless people. No internet access present day is well… for a lot of people no chance to even find a home or job…
Why sell ? They worked for it, even as it’s begging in the streets so less change they will sell it as cheap they got it
Result: I had some homeless that bought one through me for really not much, and omg the responses…
- Found a job with a caravan to live in while working
- Found a place that I can call mine, cheap rent not fancy but hey it’s a start
- Making now a 150-250 a month extra doing some surveys and other stuff, this is a new start for me
- Managed to do more paperwork to get back ok without the need to travel a lot, which I couldn’t afford
This project I started got me in refurbished equipment and so I stumbled on CHIA , using refurbished stuff
At the end I’m one of those with 999 failed things and maybe no1000 will be the good one or not, but hey it’s a fun road
