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id: farmq7
title: What is the difference between Farming and Mining?
---

While initially a simple computer was enough to mine Bitcoin, its increasing value quickly sparked interest, however, the difficulty of the calculations required for mining is automatically adjusted according to the number of machines that are candidates for these operations. Thus, the more miners there are, the more complex the calculations. With a price that today exceeds several tens of thousands of euros, it is useless to try to mine Bitcoin with a simple desktop computer, the sector became so competitive that chips dedicated to these calculations have been created.
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ThreeFold's farming model has a very different and simple approach.
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ThreeFold's farming model uses Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) which is more efficient than Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms. PoS is as of today the most energy efficient protocol since it barely requires any CPU time, the only energy needed to keep the validator connected to the network is enough disk space to hold the blockchain and the system. But on ThreeFold you don't need any validator to secure the chain as PoC is only used as a token distribution mechanism.
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All that is needed for PoC is enough disk space to host ThreeFold's unique operating system - Zero-OS. The capacity provided by the 3Node is automatically detected and verified by Zero-OS and stored in the Blockchain Database, making it available to the ThreeFold Grid. The Zero-OS is super-lightweight, weighing 200MB, making it incredibly efficient. We can expect ThreeFold's Farming model to be up-to 10,000x  more efficient than Bitcoin mining and 10x more efficient than any PoS protocol.
