Topic: A case for Burst's Proof Of Capacity (Read 675 times)

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

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.

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

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

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.  

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

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).

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?.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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.”

Let me begin by showing you this quote from a miner who says that we are failing in looking at the big picture.


Is that his argument? But how big is his "picture"? Because my big picture is the Earth, and how we as a species are collectively trying to destroy it. For what? Tokens, digital gold, riches, wealth.

I am not trying to tell you to stop supporting BTC, but all of you should start supporting Proof of Capacity as an alternative instead of supporting the other PoW planet killers.

There Is Nothing Virtual About Bitcoin’s Energy Appetite

• The total network of computers plugged into the Bitcoin network consumes as much energy each day as some medium-size countries — which country depends on whose estimates you believe. And the network supporting Ethereum, the second-most valuable virtual currency, gobbles up another country’s worth of electricity each day.
  
  
• The energy consumption of these systems has risen as the prices of virtual currencies have skyrocketed, leading to a vigorous debate among Bitcoin and Ethereum enthusiasts about burning so much electricity.
  
  
• The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is leading an experiment with a more energy-efficient way to create tokens, in part because of his concern about the impact that the network’s electricity use could have on global warming.
  
  “I would personally feel very unhappy if my main contribution to the world was adding Cyprus’s worth of electricity consumption to global warming,” Mr. Buterin said in an interview.

Why do I keep rallying for Burst and Proof of Capacity? Because it matters.

Why do I think it matters? Because saving the environment matters and we should not add further damage to it.

What else? Because the crackdown on BTC miners has started in China and wasteful use of electricity is one of the reasons for it, and it will become the main reason on why every country's government will start going after it.

Final words? We need to show them that there is a more efficient, cheaper and a more distributed way to secure blockchains.

Support me in rallying for Burst and PoC. Ty.

Proof-of-Capacity, The Green Alternative?

• PoC is not so very different from PoW except for one major differentiator, in PoC, rather than doing a large amount of work in order to verify each block, the work is done up front in the process called “plotting” and the results from this process are used later to verify each block.
  
  
• The basic idea to take away from this is that in PoC the “work” is done once during plotting rather than with each new block, allowing PoC to realize a huge efficiency savings over PoW systems. The amount of “work” a miner will end up doing depends on the amount of free disk space they have available to devote to the plotting process.
  
  
• Plotting is the process of generating plot files, which are just files storing a large number of pre-computed hashes. Each plot file contains one of more groups of 8192 hashes, these groups are called nonces. A nonce is exactly 256KiB in size (8192 x 32 bytes per hash). Additionally, each nonce is divided into 4096 pairs of hashes, the pairs are referred to as scoops. Each nonce can also be identified by its index number, ranging from 0 to 2^64.
  
  
• Once the plot files have been generated, the actual mining process can take place. The miner will first fetch the relevant information from the wallet for the current block, this includes a 32 byte hash called the “generation signature” from the previous block, the block height (index of the current block), and something called the “base target” which is calculated based on the last 24 blocks and can be considered as the “difficulty level” of the block.
  
  
• Burst PoC2 and PoC3 are mentioned in the recent Burst Dymaxion whitepaper. Development of PoC2 is already underway as part of the Dymaxion effort. The primary change in PoC2 will be relegated to the formatting of the plot files in order to provide protection against the “time-memory tradeoffs” as outlined in the SpaceMint whitepaper. The authors of the SpaceMint paper suggest that a miner doing a bit extra work could potentially have an edge on other miners while using less space.
  
  
• Burst PoC3 is considered a Post-Dymaxion change. It proposed to build on PoC2, but with the ability to store dual-use data (i.e. Burst plots and non-plot data).

I call upon you again to support Burst and Proof of Capacity for a more sustainable cryptocurrency future. I love BTC, but we have to face the reality that Proof of Work mining is not sustainable for a greener, more healthy environment.

You dont have to buy and hold millions, or you dont have to buy Burst at all. But I ask, make everyone, especially developers, more aware that Proof of Capacity is here and worth working and researching into as an alternative.

Opinion: How Bitcoin works, and why it’s a menace

• Because the mathematical problems are increasingly complex, ASIC miners run constantly and the result is an extreme amount of energy consumption that is only slated to rise.
  
  
• Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimates a rate of around 32 terawatt hours of energy a year, which, for scale, is closest to Serbia’s annual rate (meaning it’s larger than that of 159 other countries).
  
  
• Digiconomist also reported that one Chinese Bitcoin mine emitted carbon dioxide at the same rate as a Boeing 747.
  
  
• Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist, expects that at the current rate, the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption will be at US levels by mid-2019 and by 2020 will be comparable to that of the world.
  
  
• With this trajectory, Bitcoin mines causing frequent blackouts (as they already do in Venezuela) will soon become commonplace. This troubling unsustainability can no longer be ignored and potential coin connoisseurs ought to look towards utilizing more energy-efficient consensus algorithms for transaction validation or, at the very least, reinvest their revenues in development of more environmentally-friendly mining technology.

I know BTC users will argue that mining uses less electricity than the whole banking industry. But thats not the point. The point is Proof of Work mining is still wasteful and its having an negative impact on our environment.

Proof of Capacity and HDD mining which use less energy is the future of cryptocurrency mining. Everyone has to start accepting that fact.

Bitcoin Consumes 30 Times More Electricity than Tesla Cars

• In 2018, Bitcoin’s power demand is set to more than triple, consuming as much energy in a year as the entire nation of Argentina, according to a new report by Morgan Stanley (MS, +0.50%).
  
  
• The bank’s analysts forecast that Bitcoin mining could use up more than 125 terawatt hours of electricity this year, a level electric vehicles globally won’t reach until 2025. Last year, Bitcoin consumed 36 terawatt hours of energy—as much as the country of Qatar, Morgan Stanley estimated in a research note published Wednesday.
  
  
• By comparison, all the Tesla (TSLA, +0.96%) cars on the road (about 280,000 at the end of 2017, according to company statistics) likely used less than 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity combined for the year, a Fortune analysis found. The analysis assumed each car drove 15,000 miles—roughly the national average—at a rate of 30 kilowatt hours of electricity per 100 miles, based on the median mileage rate for Tesla Model 3 and Model S vehicles, according to figures reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.