FAQ
General
What are harvesters, farmers, full nodes, and timelords?
You can read about each of them and the architecture in the Architecture Overview page. The Consensus Intro page is the most current documentation, however.
What is a proof of space?
A proof of space is a proof that a farmer has allocated a portion of their storage in a way that is very difficult to create in real-time but efficient to pre-compute and store on a hard drive. The Chia Proof of Space Construction document goes deeply into the math and implementation considerations to mitigate Hellman's Time - Memory tradeoff problem. A plot is a large set of proofs of space. A harvester can harvest multiple plots on the same machine. A farmer can then control multiple harvesters across many machines to manage the whole "farm".
Farming uses substantially less electricity than Proof of Work for the same unit of security. You can learn more at chiapower.org.
What is a VDF/proof of time?
A VDF, also known as a proof of time, is a sequential operation that takes a prescribed amount of time to compute (and which cannot be accelerated by parallelism) and which produces an accompanying proof whose result may be quickly verified. This must be done in a group, for which Chia uses ideal class groups. You can learn about them in our class group document. Timelords usually run three VDFs at a time for the three internal blockchains of the Chia blockchain. They run as vdf_client
processes.