"PoS is a mirror image of the real world"? "Spacemesh" using space-time proof wants to further lower the threshold for mining

Text | Kang Kang

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced by Odaily Planet Daily

Bitcoin’s energy consumption and concentration of computing power have been increasingly criticized. The rise of the Staking economy has aroused people’s expectations for a new round of PoS mechanisms, but the excessive concentration of tokens and security issues have caused public chain developers to rethink the consensus mechanism.

Recently, Odaily Planet Daily came into contact with a hard disk mining project called Spacemesh , which uses PoST (Proof of Space Time) as a consensus mechanism . Spacemesh will be launched on the test network within 6 weeks and will start hard disk mining at the same time. In order to understand the operating mechanism of the project and the specific rules of mining, Planet Daily interviewed its CEO Tomer Afek.

When it comes to proof of space and time, the first thing that comes to my mind is Filecoin, which is a distributed storage. Different from Filecoin, Spacemesh occupies hard disk storage for "useless" temporary data used to maintain network security, rather than files such as movies and audio ("more useful" decentralized storage scenarios); different from Burst, the originator of hard disk mining, Chia, Tomer's favorite PoST project, and BHD, which uses PoC (Proof of capacity), Spacemesh's technical innovations include: based on the PoST consensus, using the DAG topology structure to replace the chain structure, and using the Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus "rabbit protocol" and the "tortoise protocol" to determine whether the block is valid to determine the security of the ledger; adjusting the difficulty coefficient through the POET node (POET node is a software service that connects to each mining node to adjust the difficulty coefficient and distribute token rewards to prevent witch attacks).

Regarding the participation threshold that miners are more concerned about, Tomer recently announced at the Beijing Meetup that the minimum mining conditions for Spacemesh are: dual-core computer, 4G memory, and 150G reserved hard disk (see here for details ) . Tomer believes that if the computer can be used to play games and mine to make money at the same time, more young people will participate in mining.

Why does Tomer care so much about "getting more people to mine"? Tomer has never been good at dealing with people since he was a child. His greatest strength is mathematics. After working in equity investment in traditional industries for 7 years, he joined a startup company. Later, he lacked a direction in life until he read Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper and thought that this (blockchain) was his lifelong goal. However, "PoW mining has a high threshold and is not environmentally friendly. The distribution of PoS coins is not transparent, and the power is concentrated in the hands of chaebols, which is basically a mirror image of the real world", which violates Satoshi Nakamoto's original intention. Therefore, Spacemesh hopes to control the growth rate of the coin price and make it "Better Money".

According to official data, the total number of Spacemesh tokens is 7 million, with 1 million produced in the first year, and then the output will decrease by 100,000 per year until all are mined. Its economic model is similar to Zcash and Grin, with a high inflation rate in the early stage to prevent speculators from entering.

However, we believe that both ASIC mining machines and hard disk mining will give rise to integrated hardware as the industry develops, and eventually form economies of scale. Once the income from mining Spacemesh exceeds the investment in hard disks in the future, it will still attract a large number of "professional miners" to join. At the same time, hard disk mining has not yet undergone long-term security verification like Bitcoin, and the use of hard disks will also cause a certain amount of resource waste.

According to the official website roadmap, Spacemesh released the first version of the white paper in the first quarter of 2018, completed the development of the core code of the test network in Q1 2019, and plans to launch the main network in Q3 next year after the recent launch of the test network. In the future, it will consider adding technologies such as smart contracts, privacy transfers, and state channels, and enrich the developer community. Tomer said that Spacemesh has a long-term plan and hopes to carry out this project for 20 years or even longer. From the current point of view, the progress of Spacemesh has not fallen behind the roadmap.

The Spacemesh team currently has more than 20 people, mainly based in Tel Aviv and New York. Its founder and CEO Tomer Afek once worked for Evergreen, one of Israel's earliest venture capital companies, and its CTO Retting was the original core developer of Ethereum.

It is understood that Spacemesh received a US$15 million Series A financing in September 2018, led by Polychain, and followed by more than 10 capitals including Arrington XRP Capital, Danhua Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, NGC, 1KX, and Gumi Cryptos.