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
...
I was hoping to plug some external drives into the mining rigs to mine this whilst they are on.
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.
You can see Burst as a measurement and compensation for disk space capacity. The feature/service of data storage doesn't have to be on blockchain. To use the space for data, there has to be a market and a market price. Both are actually featured in Burst.
Imagine User A wants to save 40 TB of data - he can negotiate for example with haitch about storing his useful data instead of mining Burst. User A will pay haitch a compensation for not mining Burst, but storing his data and bandwith. User A chooses haitch because he is mining Burst since XX months with 80 TB 99,9% uptime - logged and proofed by Burst blockchain.
User A can contact haitch by Burst messaging system. He can also go to the decentralized market of Burst and offer money for saving his data. Haitch could do the same, by offering storage on Burst market for money.
Long story short: Burst gives storage capacity a shadow price and brings its own payment system with it. That such trades have not happened tells me that there's no big enough market for this (yet).
Burst on the other hand is disruptive innovation: It offers the same but most important feature: Transactions. Like all the other PoW coins, but Burst is not mined with CPUs, GPUs & ASICs. By mining with disk capacity Burst has much lower operating costs than its competitors and therefore much lower transaction costs in the long run. Also the mining technique favors small miners and therefore decentralization of mining, because of the larger overhead big mining rigs have. Mining equipment is available all over the world and electricity price is not a crucial and centralizing factor.
Burst solves two big problems: doesn't waste energy and keeps being decentralized by design.
- daWallet