I think 'prime' proof-of-work is interesting, but that it will ultimately result in an economic failure for data storage.
I'd like to propose a gradual (but requiring a hard-fork) upgrade to 'proof of data' which would just be to find sha 256 hash of the required difficulty *over the entire blockchain*. This basically means your hash rate is proportional to how fast you can read the blockchain off disk (or you keep it in memory)
This approach to Proof of Storage (or Proof of data) could be interesting, I am not sure if I get your idea. Do you mean hashing data chunks until you find a hash with the target difficulty ?
What I wonder is if we're thinking of the same thing, and by the time I get done optimizing proof-of-data if it ends up being very similiar to your concept.. Or is there some paper on proof-of-resource you can link me to?
Also wondering what @super3 means by "new proof of resource algorithms", never heard about this term before.
About doing a new coin or hard-forking DTC. First of all consider the fact that the original Datacoin developer _seems_ to have disappeared so whoever proposes a hard fork (and the community accepts it, which I am sure it will) would also be in charge of maintaining the original code base (this could be a pain). Also, there are some issues with Datacoin when blocks are full of data (it should be tested more thoroughly).
One drawback of creating a new coins is that most of them have low credibility and getting exposure is harder every day. Also with a new coin you would loose the current Datacoin community, although small, the community is focused on the new features.
What I would do is :
- Create a new fork of a well maintained chain (Bitcoin, Litecoin, ...).
- Add new features.
- Propose the Datacoin holders to invest in the new coin through a Proof-of-Burn (essentially you destroy Datacoins and get NewCoins), this way you will give some value to Datacoin and at the same time you will get the part of the community interested in your coin. After the PoB, the NewCoins are distributed among the addresses that burned DTC with a premine for the total of DTC burned (or whatever ratio is fair) which will be distributed to the new holders.
- Set up some marketing strategy, services, pools, whatever ...
- Launch the newcoin.
Anyway the most important part are the new features and that's where the details are missing at the moment. Proof of Storage is definately possible but I have yet to see a working proof of concept, super3 ?
BTW, I would love to get involved in this in some way.
My 2 mBTC
EDIT: I assumed everybody does know what ProofOfBurn is which may not be true. You send DTC to an unspendable address (a valid address with an unknown private key), see the Counterparty thread here at BTCtalk for an explanation. I believe this is one of the most fair distribution systems. Also Datacoin would recover since it has an infinite supply.
