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.
Yes, let's go back to the PC and maybe GPU. The original idea of Bitcoin and PoW are using the spare computation of PC, right?
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?
PC have free bandwidth and spare compuation. The only cost is a 8T-16T hard disk. No SSD reqiuired.
And remember the user storage requirement is not one-time paid. There is sustainable incoming for miners.
The "others" who are "worried" about the energy cost of Proof-of-Work aren't sufficiently educated enough to understand Proof-of-Work, or they're just enemies of the ecosystem.
PoW is almost perfect except the energy cost and the mining pool. If the "enemies" are using the PoW computation, they would have nothing to complain.
If PoW still has space to improve, let's upgrade it! (Upgrade PoW first, not Bitcoin)
I do this because I love PoW.
We all know how Proof-of-Stake works, and if there were no tradeoffs compared to Proof-of-Work, we'd have already switched to it. But, it comes with some serious disadvantages, those are centralization and security sacrifice.
For decentralization, you definely want a PoW with no mining pool.
Anyway, if your idea requires no consensus, as I've already said, it can be built as a sidechain.
The core idea is let PoW algorithm output both consensus and Proof of Replication/encoding within same computation.
If we just use PoW for encoding, it make no sense to build anything.