Hi,
This project is very interesting. Just 3 questions.
1. Will burst be less desirable now there are coins that store useful data
2. Can burst be tweaked to store useful data
3. It seems to use a lot of BW? how much BW will storing 50TB of data require in 24 hours?
I was hoping to plug some external drives into the mining rigs to mine this whilst they are on.
1. What makes burst special is all the stuff we got from NXT as well as a few extra bells and whistles that has been added to burst, that NXT lack. The end user might not care that much if burst was mined with ASIC, GPU, CPU or harddisks - but it seems that harddisk mining spreads the mining out on more people, as it is easier to get a meaningful return wo burning a lot of watts, so ppl with expensive electricity can join the mining.The coin might be considered safer than coins with more concentrated mining. BURST is not (yet) about storing data, but should this be implemented we'd have a running start as the network is already larger than most other coins storing data, which are only in beta. We've been with between 4 and 10 petabytes for a long time (4000 to 10000 terabytes)
2. I think what burst could do is to introduce data plots as well as mining plots so miners can decide either to mine or to store data or both. The advantage is that we already have a real friggin' big lot of harddrive space with BURST, so should we start doing data, capacity will be awesome compared to the competition.
3. I haven't bothered measuring, but personally with 80+TB i never have issues with bandwidth. The mining is exceptionally smart designed, your computer read a small part of your plots from your drives, which gives you a deadline time, say 3 minutes.. computer just wait until 3 mintes have passed and only if nobody else have started a new block, computer do the block and send it to the network... so unless you have the best deadline, the only network traffic computer need, is for wallet to get new blocks and sync up with other wallets.. You will spend a good bit of disk-bus bandwith inside the pc, reading data off disks though, but only once every 4 minutes or thereabouts and then only for 30-40 seconds, if you use USB3 or SATA. (at least that's my timings with up to 8TB large disks).
If you are on windows and go 20TB plus per box you might start having fun with some bad design in the windows OS, where it seems windows disk cache does not release memory as fast as it uses it, slowing down the system, using lots of RAM, swapping out important stuff. W10 is much better than W7 with this, but can still be troublesome, you will have to tweak stuff a bit to get it to run smoothly, but only if you go way high on number of disks and terabytes, i guess 20TB+ is where the first problems kick in, on some rigs, not on others.