Will PoW be replaced? PoC may usher in a new era of mining

Thanks to the consensus mechanism adopted by Bitcoin, BTC is regarded by many analysts as one of the most secure databases in the world. At the same time, the high energy consumption caused by PoW has been increasingly criticized by society. In order to reduce energy consumption and mining entry barriers, projects including Ethereum, Filecoin, Lava, etc. have turned their attention to new consensus mechanisms, such as the PoC algorithm that focuses on simple mining.

※According to data from the University of Cambridge, the annual energy consumption for Bitcoin mining is close to the annual electricity consumption levels of Belgium and Finland in 2016, and has exceeded the annual electricity consumption levels of Colombia and Venezuela (Source: www.cbeci.org)

Similar to PoW, PoC is also a consensus mechanism based on hash functions. Miners also need to calculate hash values ​​that meet specific conditions to compete for the right to record accounts. However, the difference is that the capacity consensus mechanism uses an extremely slow hash algorithm, which transfers the difficulty of obtaining the "solution result" from the chip's computing speed to capacity storage. For this reason, PoC mining does not require much computing power, because it only performs file or data storage/extraction operations, so the more algorithms stored in the miner's local hard drive, the more likely it is to calculate the result faster and obtain the corresponding block reward.

Therefore, as long as there is a hard drive and broadband, PoC miners can mine at home and jointly maintain the operation of the blockchain. This shift from computing power competition to capacity and storage capacity competition can not only effectively solve the problem of high power consumption while maintaining security and fairness comparable to the PoW chain, but also reduce the entry threshold of the network to a certain extent, making mining possible for all people.

Taking Lava, which is committed to building a global decentralized storage space trust facility, as an example, miners only need to be equipped with a standard computer and a certain capacity of idle hard disk to participate in mining; if according to Lava's current computing power, using 8T memory to join the network operation, about 130 Lava tokens can be obtained per month. Among them, the cost of a mining machine with 8T memory is less than 3,000 yuan, and the annual power consumption of an ordinary computer is even more insignificant compared with the Bitcoin mining machine with a power of kilowatts. It is worth mentioning that Lava has also added a virtual layered token concept "Lava-Firestone" based on PoC mining, allowing miners to generate "firestones" by freezing or mortgaging Lava, and obtain double mining rewards by consuming "firestones".

On the other hand, with the increasing popularity of streaming media and the continuous expansion of the cloud storage market, the situation of insufficient memory due to excessive downloading will be greatly reduced in the future, because users can directly perform many operations online besides watching videos. Under this background, the size of the hard disk capacity will no longer be a problem that everyone needs to worry about. In theory, the idle storage space of the user's computer can become the potential computing power of the PoC blockchain network. From this perspective, the lowering of the entry threshold of the PoC project also invisibly promotes the realization of a more decentralized network.

According to PCWorld data, it is estimated that by 2020, the total amount of global data will reach 40ZB, with an average of 5.2TB per person worldwide; the global distribution of hard disks is much more decentralized than that of mining machines. In other words, when the PoC blockchain ecosystem is mature enough, the relevant network will be able to almost completely avoid the situation where mining tyrants control the entire chain; after all, a mining pool formed by several companies is still difficult to compete with all the potential hard disk storage space in the world.

In fact, the PoC consensus mechanism was proposed and implemented by BurstCoin as early as 2014. In recent years, it has attracted more and more attention from the market. In addition to the gradual maturity of the algorithm, it also reflects the field's concerns about the high energy consumption and centralization of the PoW chain. Of course, at present, it is not realistic to expect PoC to replace BTC's strongest consensus and become the next PoW in a short period of time; however, with the increase in global power consumption of the PoW chain and the emergence of centralization issues, PoC, a simple mining model that pursues extreme decentralization, may be recognized and paid attention to by more people, and projects such as Lava that have occupied the track at this stage will be the first to be practiced and verified on the road to PoC becoming mainstream.