Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: A useful PoW without replacing Nakamoto Consensus
by
NotATether
on 28/10/2022, 08:41:49 UTC
I wouldn't say I like PoS, as the soul of blockchain, is about the miners contributing resources but not capitalizing.

I agree with this.

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So, another direction we can try is to make PoW "more useful".

I'm not going to get into any more bikeshedding about usefulness so let's just leave it at that.

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Assuming there are three roles:
Blockchain system, miners, and users in the system,
I can say the current PoW mining is useful to the blockchain system security.
The user cannot feel insecure unless the amount of computation is low enough (most of the miners quit).

EcoPoW is adding another usage to the existing PoW.
It did not change PoW for consensus at all.
And the PoRep/encoding with EcoPoW does not cost extra computing.
It is useful to blockchain users as proof that the data is kept by a resource (storage) provider honestly.
The storage providers (miners) can charge the users with the proof. It is the new revenue source for the miners.

I'm assuming this is going to work as long as a miner has other resources to sell such as storage, and by that metric, things like network traffic and RAM?

If so, then you should know that most ASICs only have a minimal amount of storage, so the EcoPoW cannot be directly used by them without dramatic redesigns of the ASIC. You can't just slap in a hard disk drive without shooting up the average cost of the miner by some margin.