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Let’s get you started with Chia Blockchain in just a few minutes. Follow these steps and you’ll get some free Chia, do your first transaction, and even play with Chialisp, a new smart contract language.

Chia’s blockchain network is secured primarily by computer storage rather than energy, so it’s much more energy efficient than Bitcoin. And it also leads to a more decentralized node network. Its smart contract language is designed to be more auditable and have a much lower risk profile than Solidity.

Let’s go!

1. Create your first wallet. Install the chia client which’ll guide you into creating first wallet at https://www.chia.net/download/
2. Write down the Receive Address of your wallet, because we’re going to send it a
   transaction soon. To view it, click on the “Wallets” vertical tab on the left, and look
   for the Receive Address. Write it down somewhere.
3. Create a second Chia wallet. Close the GUI client, and then start it again. When it starts, click on “Create a new private key” to create a second wallet.
4. Get some free Chia. Head to faucet.chia.net, and use the address you wrote down in step 2 to get it sent some Chia. Then do the same thing with your new second Chia wallet, using its Receive Address. You may need to reload or restart your browser if the faucet website gives you errors.
5. Check your address balances on https://www.chiaexplorer.com/ This will give you some experience using the explorer and using it to poke around the blockchain records. This is also helpful because your GUI client is probably still syncing up to the blockchain, so it probably doesn’t show the amounts that you received from the faucet.

Now that we’ve made progress with simple Chia wallets and gotten some free Chia, we’ll start setting up some development tools to play around with Chialisp, Chia’s smart contract language.

1. Install clvm_tools, by heading to https://github.com/Chia-Network/clvm_tools
2. Try running your first Chialisp code by adding two numbers together. Try typing in this:
   brun ‘(+ 1 (q . 3))’ ’39’
3. Now install Atom to use as a code editor if you don’t have it already, at www.atom.io . Chialisp uses parentheses…, lots of parentheses. Using a code editor like Atom will help you avoid bugs from unclosed parentheses.
4. Once your Chia client has sync’d up to the network, you can do your first Chia transaction. Note that it may take a long, long time to sync up, and the GUI client currently won’t let you send a transaction til it sync’s up. To send chia from your second wallet to your first wallet, go to the “Wallets” vertical tab in the Chia GUI client, and go to the “Create Transaction” section. In the Address / Puzzle hash section, pop in the address you wrote down in step 2. For Amount, type in 0.000000000002, and you’ll see that it says ‘2 mojos’ underneath. Mojos are the smallest unit of Chia, just like Satoshis are for Bitcoin. For “Fee”, try typing in 0, or else you could type in 0.000000000002 there if 0 doesn’t work for you. As I write this, you can get a transaction processed by the network without having to pay a transaction fee.

I hope this has helped you get started with Chia very quickly. Follow me on Twitter and sign
up for my email alerts here for when I post new content.

Frequently-Asked Question: How many transactions per block are there in chia? Here are a couple of examples with 47 and 48 transactions in one block: https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/okk0fb/couple_of_lucky_blocks_with_40_transactions_for_a/h591oju/

I’ve created a new page on Herd Immunity. The goal is to have a one-stop spot where you can look at assumptions about the Herd Immunity theory, and have them explained in pretty simple language. It’s now on its second version, and I have more upgrades I’m looking to add to it.

It’s really important to look at assumptions when we get excited about different theories, and so I hope this helps with that.

Here it is, Herd Immunity

I also relate it to the current pandemic, COVID-19. I plan to continue developing the page over time, so feel free to post it as a link when people are in a conversation evaluating the concept. I hope this helps, and welcome your feedback.

I’m just logging these notes here to point back to it later. Here are some thoughts I’ve had for quite a while regarding the current pandemic.

In probability, a very useful concept is called conditional probability. It means what is the probability of something given that we know something else exists or has happened. It can be really useful as a thinking tool when we want to consider the probabilities of whether something is true or not. In many circumstances we don’t need perfect information or so-called ‘data’ in order to make decisions, especially decisions to be cautious. Some insight into probabilities can be enough. “Biodefense” — being able to protect humans against ‘enemy’ biology or chemistry, especially of the multiplicative and non-natural kind, has been on my mind for several years. I even discussed the idea of a startup to work on biodefense briefly with some friends at a major venture capital fund when we had dinner together in Panama many years ago. My main issue was that such a startup might actually increase the risk of biodefense situations and especially downside risk for those working there (me! if I did it), so I didn’t take the idea further.

Now we have the COVID-19 virus from Wuhan, China. It’s worth using the conditional probability concept to consider where the virus came from, in conjunction with another thinking tool, “Occam’s Razor”. We usually think of Occam’s Razor as meaning that “the simplest solution is most likely the right one”. Rather interestingly the actual principle is: “entities should not be multiplied without necessity”. Perhaps we can think of a virus entity that need not be multiplied.

We can consider the conditional probability that given that a pandemic comes out of China, what is the probability that it would come out of Wuhan, home of China’s only known biosafety level 4 facility. There are several other givens we can mix into our analyses of probabilities to later do an analysis
of what is the probability that this virus was human-engineered or human-bred. Additional sample givens could include proximity of the Wuhan lab to the live animal market (if that market really was any factor) and known instances of lab workers selling lab animals to such markets instead of destroying them, reaction and behavior patterns of authority figures and government process to the proceedings of the awareness of the initial viral spread, etc. More items can be to compare the important unknown but gradually comparable parameters of the virus to other viruses in the past and consider why it is so different than them. Sample parameters can include the period of non-symptomatic contagion (how long people can be infecting others before they realize they might have it), contagiousness, length of delay til death, reinfection rate, etc.

My goal in this write-up is not to come to a conclusion nor to enumerate all of the possible givens to which we apply conditional probability and Occam’s Razor. It is more to present this form of analysis to the reader, so that they may employ it in their own analysis of this and other questions. In a simplified, brief analysis of this current pandemic without deep research, it does indicate to me a very significant baseline probability that the virus is human-engineered/enhanced or bred.

by Adrian Scott, Ph.D., of SomaCapital.com, profiting from market ups and downs. Please subscribe to this blog to get notifications of new posts, plus follow me on Twitter and Instagram.