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

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).

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

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.

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).

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.  

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

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