PoW will be replaced? PoC may start a new era of mining

Thanks to the consensus mechanism adopted by Bitcoin, BTC has been evaluated by many analysts as one of the most secure databases for human beings at the same time; at the same time, the high energy consumption problem caused by PoW is increasingly criticized by society. In order to reduce energy consumption and the entry threshold for mining, projects including Ethereum, Filecoin, Lava, etc. have turned their attention to new consensus mechanisms, such as the PoC algorithm that focuses on simple mining.

※ According to the data from the University of Cambridge, the annual energy consumption for bitcoin mining is close to the annual power consumption levels of Belgium and Finland in 2016, and has exceeded the annual power consumption levels of Colombia and Venezuela (Source: www. cbeci.org)

Similar to PoW, PoC is also a consensus mechanism based on a hash function. Miners also need to calculate hash values ​​that meet specific conditions to compete for bookkeeping rights; however, the capacity consensus mechanism uses an extremely slow hash The algorithm transfers the difficulty of obtaining the "question-solving result" from the computing speed of the chip to the capacity storage. Because of this, PoC mining does not require much computing power, because it only performs file or data storage / extraction operations, so the more algorithms stored in the local hard disk of a miner, the more likely it is to calculate the result faster And get the corresponding block reward.

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To this end, as long as there is a hard disk and broadband, PoC miners can mine at home and jointly maintain the operation of the blockchain. And this shift from competition in computing power to competition in capacity and storage capacity can not only effectively solve the problem of high power consumption on the basis of maintaining the security and fairness equivalent to the PoW chain, but also reduce the network accuracy to a certain extent. Entry barriers make mining possible for all.

Take Lava, which is committed to establishing a global decentralized storage space trust facility, as an example. Miners only need to be equipped with a standard configuration computer and a certain amount of idle hard disks to participate in mining. If Lava's current computing power is used, 8T is used. Memory is added to the network to run, and about 130 Lava tokens can be obtained each month. The cost of the mining machine with 8 T memory is less than 3,000 yuan. As for the annual power consumption of ordinary computers, it is even more insignificant compared to the bitcoin mining machine with a power of several kilowatts. It is worth mentioning that Lava also added a virtual layered token concept "Lava-Firestone" on the basis of PoC mining, so that miners can generate "Firestone" by freezing or mortgage Lava, and Get double mining reward by consuming "Firestone".

On the other hand, with the increasing popularity of streaming media and the continuous expansion of the cloud storage market, the situation of insufficient memory due to excessive downloads in the future will be greatly reduced, because users can directly perform many operations other than watching videos online. In this context, the hard disk capacity will no longer be a problem that everyone needs to worry about. The idle storage space of user computers can theoretically become the potential computing power of the PoC blockchain network. From this perspective, the lowering of entry barriers for PoC projects has also virtually promoted the realization of a more decentralized network.

According to data from PCWorld, it is estimated that by 2020, the total amount of global data will reach 40ZB and the global per capita is 5.2TB; the world distribution of hard disks is much more decentralized than the distribution of mining machines. In other words, until the ecology of the PoC blockchain is mature enough, the situation in which the mining chain controls the entire chain can be completely avoided in the relevant network; after all, mining pools formed by several companies are still difficult to connect with all the global Potential hard drive storage space.

In fact, the PoC consensus mechanism was proposed and implemented by BurstCoin as early as 2014. In recent years, it has become more and more popular in the market. In addition to the gradual maturity of the algorithm, it also reflects the high energy consumption of the PoW chain and the PoW chain. Concerns about centralization. Of course, at present, it is not realistic for PoC to replace the strongest consensus of BTC and become the next PoW in a short time; however, as the global power consumption of the PoW chain increases, the problem of centralization has become more prominent. The ultimate decentralized simple mining model may be recognized and paid attention to by more people, and projects that have already occupied the track such as Lava at this stage will be the first to be practiced and verified on the road of PoC becoming mainstream.

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