A case for Burst's Proof Of Capacity

[pinkflower]

This is the time to be aware of what Proof of Work cryptocurrencies are doing to our planet. I know there are some developers who are asking "what alternative is there". Proof of Capacity is there. Dont you see?

If you think it is not secure or there are flaws in it, then help the Burst developers figure out how to fix them for the sake of the environment. Anyhow, you will all fathom the folly of your coins once your kids are suffering from a dying environment.

We are starting to see it in the South African drought.

Bitcoin, the virtual currency, has become a massive energy hog

• Verifying bitcoin transactions is so energy intensive the currency tops 159 individual countries in energy consumption, according to data consultant Alex de Vries.
  
  
• Data consultant Alex de Vries calculated bitcoin’s energy costs and, according to his Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, submitting all those numbers demands a tremendous amount of computing power which translates into massive energy consumption.
  
  
• The creation of a single bitcoin requires about 50,000 kilowatt-hours. In the US, the average residential rate is about 10 to 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. In China, electric costs are a bit less expensive: about 4 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. In total, the whole bitcoin network pays almost $2 billion per year just to mine bitcoins. The electric bills end up at the miners, so users never see how much energy the system consumes, de Vries says.
  
  
• Notably, most of the bitcoin miners are located in China, "which makes the energy consumption problem a whole lot worse because China doesn't have a very clean electricity grid,” de Vries adds. “From several miners, we know that they are located very near to coal-based power plants, so they are drawing a lot of coal-based electricity. That causes the carbon footprint of each bitcoin transaction to be gigantic, as well.”

[pinkflower]

It appears that the Chinese mining companies have started moving their interests to Canada. What now? Is that where they start polluting another country with their wasteful use of energy? I have been rallying for Proof of Capacity in the forum for months, but its always been ignored.

Its time to open your eyes people. PoW is not sustainable.

China's unwanted bitcoin miners may move to Canada

[pinkflower]

In spite that I disagree with some of the concerns in this article, the main message is fair and honest. The energy consumption in BTC mining simply is not sustainable.

I know. I sound like a broken record lol.

Bitcoin gobbles up clean energy — just when the real world needs it most

If there was a failure in BTC's system, its the arrival of Asics. You all know this be true, but you still continue to look the other way.

[d5000]

First, I'm also a Burst supporter - because I see a high potential in the Proof-of-Capacity technology. But I would like to see the sources for the assumption that a Burst transaction consumes 1/500 of a Bitcoin TX like you say in this article:

Proof-of-Capacity, The Green Alternative?

If it's based on the current power consumption of Burst's PoC in relation to Bitcoin's PoW mining, it is a bit simplifying things, because Burst is also much less secure than Bitcoin (it costs much less to attack it).

In all cryptocurrencies, validators (e.g. miners) have a "cost" to protect their coin from attacks that determines its security. The security of the coin depends on a variable I would call "attack cost" - the cost it takes you to carry out a 51% attack. This attack cost is approximately half of the total validators' cost.

The "total validators' cost"  is made up of two big parts:

- hardware costs
- electricity costs to run the hardware and do the "hashing" work

In Bitcoin, the proportion of hardware costs is a little bit lower than that of electricity costs. In Burst, instead, hardware costs are much higher than electricity costs. We can even say the electricity cost to run a Burst minter is negligible compared to the  (it should be less than 10% of the hardware cost, per month).

Based on rough estimations one can say that if Bitcoin and Burst had a similar security level - and thus similar validators' costs - then this cost in Bitcoin consists of 40% hardware and 60% electricity costs, while in Burst, it's 90% hardware and 10% electricity.

Now, the production of hardware (HDDs/SSDs) does also consume energy. Here it becomes interesting. How much of the "hardware costs" are "hidden electricity costs" - electricity used when the hardware was produced?

I would like to see a study or (serious) calculation about that relation. I assume that, as the "electricity cost used in production" should be only a relatively small part of the total hardware costs, the total electricity cost for a similar security level is significantly lower in Burst than in Bitcoin. But I doubt that the relation really is as low as 0,2% (1/500).

[pinkflower]

But hard drive production doesnt add to the electricity costs in relation to Burst mining because they are already produced by companies for the current demand. Bitcoin miner production are is something of a new industry that added to the world's electricity use, side by side with the electricity use in the production of GPU and CPU.

But you are also right. I would like to see that study.

[Maian]

I think that is impossible. However if that is true then people will lose faith in bitcoin because the transaction fee will surely become high. People will forget bitcoin and they will invest in altcoin instead of bitcoin.

Yes your right, the people will fucos because of that transaction fee,

[Ix]

But hard drive production doesnt add to the electricity costs in relation to Burst mining because they are already produced by companies for the current demand.

GPU manufacturers can't even keep up with demand because so many people are buying cards to mine. Hard drive manufacturers would likely run into the same problem should proof of capacity become the norm. Petabytes of storage being "burned" rather than used for other activity means that the manufacturing of those drives should be taken into account.

[d5000]

But hard drive production doesnt add to the electricity costs in relation to Burst mining because they are already produced by companies for the current demand. Bitcoin miner production are is something of a new industry that added to the world's electricity use, side by side with the electricity use in the production of GPU and CPU.

Ix was faster, I was about to post about the same. The problem is that we don't have experiences with a mature "Proof of Capacity industry", and thus can only roughly estimate the real energy use.

But where proof-of-capacity has an advantage over standard proof-of-work is the cost structure of the security. While HDDs are also "burnt" while doing PoC minting because their lifetime is limited, this process is much slower than the "burning" of electricity. Also, miner hardware gets outdated very fast, while HDDs can be used during more time - and if they are outdated and still work they still can be used for some purposes.

From the price of an HDD, I estimate that 10% or less are caused by energy consumption during production. Unfortunately there is very few material available on the web about HDD production. As an HDD can be described as a specialized electric motor, an estimation that production energy waste makes up about 1% of the carbon footprint of an electric motor during its entire life cycle (99% are used in the the "use phase") could well be true for HDDs. In this little presentation analyzing the carbon footprint of an entire computer, hard disks are not even mentioned (mainboard and GPU production seems to be much more energy intensive).

As a conclusion, I would not be surprised that a proof-of-capacity coin can achieve a similar security level than a proof-of-work coin with less than 5% of the carbon footprint. But as I wrote, a detailed study would be needed to convince the skeptics.

Edit: Just read this article, and the calculation at the bottom may be already pretty good (~3% energy "waste" compared to BTC) although it doesn't take into account the waste from HDD production.

[pinkflower]

But hard drive production doesnt add to the electricity costs in relation to Burst mining because they are already produced by companies for the current demand.

GPU manufacturers can't even keep up with demand because so many people are buying cards to mine. Hard drive manufacturers would likely run into the same problem should proof of capacity become the norm. Petabytes of storage being "burned" rather than used for other activity means that the manufacturing of those drives should be taken into account.

Then we will get to that problem and crunch the numbers when we get there. As of today, there is so much supply of hard drives that the demand is not that much to increase the prices.

With that said, once PoC3 is released that petabytes of storage "being burned" in Burst will be put to good use.

• The PoC3 consensus protocol will take over a custodian role in globally distributed redundant storage.

Taken from What is The Dymaxion?.

[d5000]

With that said, once PoC3 is released that petabytes of storage "being burned" in Burst will be put to good use.

• The PoC3 consensus protocol will take over a custodian role in globally distributed redundant storage.

Taken from What is The Dymaxion?.

While I applaud this decision (and I'm eager to know how the challenges are solved), this feature would also have a side effect: it would increase mining participation because apart from rewards, mining then would provide an "useful" service (data hosting) and thus "additional value". This would mean that energy consumption would go up. But in my opinion the efficiency of the complete system would increase, because while there's more energy consumption there is less "useless energy consumption".

I think it was Paul Sztorc who first has analyzed this topic in his well-known article Nothing is cheaper than Proof of Work - well, he analyzed "useful mining" (like heating with mining hardware) but the conclusion can be applied to "useful Proof of Capacity", too. I agree with him in this case, not so much with the rest of the conclusions he draws in the article (for me, energy efficiency is an advantage).

[pinkflower]

This may be taken as good news for miners but it should also serve as a warning. Its now visible to the EU that proof of work mining should be controlled and to quote the article "that it is subject to EU rules regarding energy efficiency, the power sector and greenhouse gases emissions."

Proof of Capacity is the future of mining or will be, at the minimum, be a big part of it.

EU Can't Ban Bitcoin Mining Over Energy Concerns, Official Says

[pinkflower]

A surprising blog from none other than Minergate, one of the largest mining pools around! This doesnt mean that they will become a Burst mining pool anytime soon, but its good that they researched about PoC and its advantages over PoW and PoS.

Why Proof-of-capacity could be the future of cryptocurrency

• Proof-of-capacity is still very new and underutilized. It may be a while before it is fully recognized for its benefits and implemented into new coins or used as an update for legacy coins like Ethereum ETH and Bitcoin BTC. It certainly deserves our attention at the very least. The ultimate goal of the cryptocurrency movement is to create a decentralized platform that can be used globally to disrupt outdated financial institutions and systems in a secure, autonomous, and shared manner. The proof-of-capacity algorithm shows great potential as a means to reaching that goal. At the same time, it requires around 30 times less power than ASIC-based PoW mining making it the most energy-efficient of the mining protocols. It isn’t hard to imagine how this approach if taken seriously, could change the horizon for cryptocurrency in very exciting ways!
  
  
• Even though there are currently no proof-of-capacity coins available on the MinerGate platform, accessibility has always been the major underlying drive for the team behind MinerGate.com. They have created the most user-friendly and accessible mining platform to date that will help you to mine the currencies best suited for your setup rather than have you competing with unbeatable ASIC farms. MinerGate.com is driven to bringing cryptocurrency to a much wider audience and encouraging their participation in this world-changing technology. As firm believers in the potential of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, the MinerGate team is always looking forward to progressive solutions offered by emerging ideas like proof-of-capacity and how to implement these protocols and others into future updates.  

[pinkflower]

Are there Chinese miners running an ASIC mining farm in the forum? Its a good time to start learning more about Burst and Proof of Capacity as a more sustainable way to mine coins.

Some of you must know deeply within yourselves that mining with hard drives, with Proof of Space, Proof of Space and Time, or Proof of Capacity is the future.

China Continues Bitcoin Mining Crackdown by Seizing 600 Computers

[pinkflower]

Another article on the wasteful use of energy in BTC's PoW mining algorithm. Bitcoin purists will find some reasons to justify PoW's wastefulness. What they should be doing is find other alternatives for PoW.

Burst and PoC might not be the answer for them, but it plotted the way to find the answer.

New study quantifies bitcoin’s ludicrous energy consumption

[pinkflower]

A writer from newsbtc.com, called JPBuntix, wrote this opinion piece to refute the assertion that PoW mining of BTC is wasteful. But his argument is weak. He did not tell us the fact that electricity is a finite resource. That is why big corporate miners move from country to country like parasites for mining profits.

Another idea he suggested is renewable energy. JPBuntix did not tell us that the cheapest way to generate electricity is by burning fossil fuels. What corporate miner is using 100% renewable energy?

Proof of Work is the best to secure blockchains, but it will not be sustainable.

[pinkflower]

This is another news of the complaints from local residents of an area where BTC Proof of Work mining is starting to stress their power grids. When will this community realize that PoW mining is not sustainable?

But its best to let them keep making the same mistakes. All of you know where Burst is when that time comes.

Bitcoin backlash as ‘miners’ suck up electricity, stress power grids in Central Washington