In an ideal case, the blockchain doesn't need to issue coins to reward the miners like Bitcoin.
It is like a free protection to the PoW blockchain network.
Nothing is free; there's always a cost involved.
The core idea of EcoPoW is get the PoW output two things rather than just than the consensus.
If the users paid, the blockchain doesnt have to issue the coin for its security, or the coin price doesnt impact to its security.
The amount of computation spent on consensus is no longer limited by the Bitcoin price.
It is; nobody will buy tons of storage drives altruistically. They will want a reward. And since mining / staking / ... rewards are paid in cryptocurrency, meanwhile hardware is priced in fiat, the exchange rate always has an impact.
No one will buy tons of storage.
But it is nice to have many miners each to buy a 8T (cheap) hard drive, and many users each purchase several gigabytes of space.
And, yes, I suggestted the storage price are counted in USDT or DAI or another algorithm stable coin in fiat.
That is another topic.
The real storage demand will power the consensus/block generation. [emphasis mine]
The more data stored on the blockchain storage system will be turned into the chain security.
(Maybe we still need the concept of token, such as ERC20 to create something like USDT, so that users can pay the miners)
Thus, we can have a more cheap and decenterizaled blockchain storage powered by PoW.
People can mine the blockchain at home with common devices.
And there is no mining pool.
You say consensus is powered by storage (like pure Filecoin), yet still want PoW somehow mixed in.
Filecoin spends most the computation on PoRep and ZK. And for the consensus, EC is actually a PoS (which doesnt cost much computing).
I believed PoW can bring the true decenterization.
The next question is very important
And how does adding file storage in parallel to a PoW (mining) blockchain suddenly allow people to mine again at home, without pools? Do you mean that people can do the 'hosting' part at home meanwhile ASIC farms still exist?
Let's forget about ASIC first. Everyone have CPU or GPU at home.
It is important to understand miners contributing computation for the reward. And nowaday, the mining pool is the only choice to get incoming.
If the computation are useful for miners to get more incoming, they will consumed the computation locally, which behaved like solo mining.
We can see the mining is a side output during file encoding.
This is how mining pools are gone naturely.
Next question,
In general, I don't think a blockchain is the right data structure for decentralized file hosting. The reason is that blockchain doesn't scale. If everyone were to upload a mere 1GB, the blockchain would reach a size of 7 Exabytes, which would require you to buy almost 400 thousand (!) of the latest IronWolf 18TB drives. That runs you roughly 160 million USD. I don't think anyone would run such a node.
I dont think scale-up is a big issue.
Maybe 7 TPS is not enough, but what if 2000-5000 TPS? It is the time to build some application.
However, I still hope the scale-up technology doesnt break the decenterization.
As we know, most of new chains are increasing TPS by decreasing the decenterization. But we must stick with the existing decenterization.
In practice, it means that storage space on the (any!) blockchain is extremely expensive due to the very fact that every single node will hold a copy of it. For anything except the most valuable information, it is cheaper, easier and overall better to use a different solution to store your data.
Users files are not into the chain blocks. Most of blockchain storage doesn't do this except AR and its Proof of Access.
For decentralized file storage, you can generally just stick to Torrents.
Yes, we already have IPFS which is similar to BitTorrent.
Nothing is free, we need a blockchain solution. Filecoin is good direction but too expensive.
For a normal user, they may prefer to purchase the storage with stable coin such as USDT or DAI, which is also different from Filecoin.
Have you modeled how expensive or how centralized this blockchain you envision, is going to be? There will be a linear correlation between nodes and storage price. And the price would need to be recurring & increase with increasing number of nodes; as well as somehow include a mechanism to account for storage getting cheaper.
Let's say we already have PC at home. We dont purchase extra bandwidth and space like in the data center. And we dont hire expensive engineers.
The only additional cost is the extra hard drives.
Maybe Chia miners would love to join this.
The miners will figure out how to get revenue higher and how to make the price lower.
Yes, just like cloud computing, it is not free.
The transactions on Bitcoin is not free as well.
Except that Bitcoin transactions are tiny, the user base is pretty small and the blockchain is still at already around 500GB. You will be able to store tiny text snippets at most, if you seek to get Bitcoin-like decentralization.
Again, the users files are not into the chain blocks.
Hoever, we definely need a high TPS and sharding blockchain.
The emails were collected for potential funding to build a blockchain.
We can only prove this idea working by actually building it.
Firstly, maybe consider forking Filecoin and adding whatever changes you like; could be simpler and cheaper than writing it from scratch.
Secondly, before building it, I'd actually try modeling it, running some simple numbers and calculations to make sure it's actually viable.
I wont fork a PoS chain. It takes longer to build, because we have to remove all the code first. Did you see Filecoin or ETH fork Bitcoin?
I already have a sharding blockchain.
The price model is adjustable, and sometimes requires the feedback from the community, but the blockchain code structure is hard to change.