i think BURSTs PoC (proof of capacity) algo is worth to look closer at because it removed the PoW and PoS design flaws (long term secure affordable decentralization).
since the algo is based on precomputed data comparable to rainbow tables there is no way to develop special centralized hardware like asics for it (in terms of running costs as capacity replacement).
for the decentralization this means everyone can buy regular hdds in the next shop around the corner or use spare capacity.
compared to PoW there are almost "no" running costs.
the coin exists for over a year now and instead of having a whitepaper it has a over 1000 pages long bitcointalk thread here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731923.0Quoting from
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/528.pdf"Perhaps the most serious security issue with Burstcoin is that it allows for time-memory
trade-offs: a miner doing just a small amount of extra computation can mine at the same rate as an honest miner while using just a small fraction of the disk-space that an honest miner would."
thanks for this link to the document. it is new to me.
the authors of the document assume that it is possible to only compute a specific scoop of a plot since they base their whole information on the only available flow chart which exists ("...a miner can initially compute and store only the value x4096." ---
http://burstcoin.info/assets/img/flow.png )
they either intentionally or due to the simplifications in the flow chart came to the conclusion that the scoop datafile content for a account-nonce combination represents a single shabal hash.
the implementation requires to compute all 4096 scoops as a block and then these get cut into 64 byte blocks which are read during the mining.
i have done my own analysis some time back (based on the c plotter sourcecode) and came to the conclusion that even the most efficient asics result in higher running costs than mining from at this time available storage devices.
grinding is basically not possible since there is no merkle root and transactions have no influence on the generated blocks.
in future asics may support the plotting and mining process like gpus do today in large rigs.
