info_tfgrid/collections/tfmanual/knowledge_base/farming/farming_intro.md

ThreeFold Farming

ThreeFold Farming ("Farming") is the process of connecting Internet capacity to the ThreeFold Grid. This process is undertaken by independent people or organization called ThreeFold Farmers ("Farmers").

What is Farming?

{{#include farming_circular.md}}

Who can become a farmer on ThreeFold?

Technically, anyone can farm on the ThreeFold Grid using any server-type hardware. By using Proof-of-Capacity, farming was designed to reward all nodes equally according to the Internt capacity they provide to the ThreeFold Grid.

Cost of farming

Anyone can become a Farmer, and there is no technical knowledge required. ThreeFold's autonomous system does all the heavy lifting, making it easy for anyone to join.

• Potential costs of the hardware necessary to provide Internet capacity and maintain a farming setup.
• Electrical costs to power the farm.
• Potential cost of equipment to support larger farming setups such as data centers (ventilation, monitoring, electrical wiring, etc).

To further explore farming rewards, click here.

How ThreeFold Internet capacity is farmed?

1. A farmer provides Internet capacity by booting compatible hardware with Zero-OS.
2. Once installed, Zero-OS locks the hardware and registers the Internet capacity in TFChain.
3. Once verified by the Proof-of-Capacity algorythm, the Internet capacity is made available to the network via the explorer.

Note: All the compute and storage data remains off-chain in order to protect the privacy of users. Once Zero-OS is booted, the device is locked in such a way that it no longer has any state or remote access, preventing farmers to access user data on a hardware level as well.

What kind of hardware can become a 3Node?

Any Intel or AMD server type hardware that contains compute and/ or storage can be connected to the ThreeFold Grid. Farmers need to download Zero-OS and boot their hardware.

Learn more here

Once booted by Zero OS, the hardware becomes a 3Node, and its total capacity will automatically be detected and registered on the blockchain database. We call this Proof-of-Capacity.

Learn more about Proof-of-Capacity here

!!!alias become_a_farmer