Chia Hardening – Store Chia Coins (XCH) safely

I assume you are already busy farming Chia Coins. Maybe even with port forwarding in a DMZ or with the firewall turned off (which is like madness).

Basics

First of all, you should take care of the basics, i.e. you should use strong passwords for all machines and close unnecessary ports. You should also not start your Chia Farmer with root rights. This is because the Farmer and its sub-services, such as the full node, will later communicate with the Internet. There is therefore an increased risk of exploiting as yet unknown security vulnerabilities.

Chia-Hardening

So how can you better secure your farmers and plotters? First of all, I recommend that you only plot with the public keys on your plotters. This means that the private key is no longer needed on the machine when plotting.

In the next step, you should think about creating and using a cold wallet for your XCH.

This is relatively easy to do; for example, you could use a new computer, install Chia there and run the command

chia keys generate_and_print

command. This command creates new keys and displays them without saving the key.

You can make a separate note of the data (especially the seed). Of course, you can also simply store the public keys and the wallet address digitally.

The aim of our efforts is of course to transfer the freshly farmed Chia Coins directly to the new cold wallet.

To do this, you need to edit your config.yaml on the Farmer and enter the following in the “Farmer:” section in the line

xch_target_address: EURE_WALLET_ADDRESS

enter your new wallet address instead of “EURE_WALLET_ADRESSE”. You must do the same again under the “Pool:” section.

You can easily open config.yaml under Linux/Debian with nano, for example:

nano ~/.chia/mainnet/config/config.yaml

Note: Each user account on the computer has its own config.yaml file

Under Windows, the setting can be adjusted under “Farmer->Three Points->Manage Farming Rewards”: