Bitcoin Forum

Guys, Tell me is it real to make new alternative coin that will have "MHash power" based on how much TBytes disks i have ?

I suppose it's possible, but it'd be a very strange, artificial coin.

How would that work? As far as i know a HDD has no computational abilities what so ever. :p

The proof of work could be designed to benefit from a large lookup table or cache of results, too big to fit in memory.  One problem with this scheme would be that solutions might be just as hard to verify as they were to solve.

I guess in theory we could do this, but I see no practical application...

Proof of work
Get a hash of the block header.

Hash that hash.

Repeat [difficulty] times.

Store the result in the disk, as well as the final hash.

Verifying the proof
The verification relies on all miners doing their part. A node selects various random start points and end points. It queries the miner about those two hashes, and verifies correctness. As these would overlap, the miner cannot cheat or he will be discovered by many miners.

As long as the difficulty is high enough, it is not practical for the miner to compute the hashes at will; instead, they have to be stored.

It would be possible, but probably not very successful as there is no competing use for the filling of memory as opposed to hash cracking. It would be somewhat counter intuitive and prone to failure.

Can this data possibly be decrypted and used as a kind of p2p cloud storage? IE you pay people to store your data and in exchange they get to spend those coins on data storage in the chain.