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Comment by craigc | Hacker News Reader

There are already blockchains that do not require proof of work (Lisk, Nav, Dash, NEO, etc) and already storage based blockchains (Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc).

It is unclear to me what Chia brings to the table that is really new.

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The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't think they're trying to be that).

While Lisk, Nav, Dash, etc do use alternatives to proof of work, what Chia is doing, from my understanding of what they're saying, is using the lowest cost alternative to proof of work, which is proof of storage (disclaimer, I don't know the math behind proof of storage, just that it's their alternative to PoW). However, proof of storage alone has some inherent vulnerabilities so they compensate with another mechanism, proof of time (again, not sure of the math).

Edit: punctuation

Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense.

When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens.

Curious to read about and see how that works

My understanding is that your computer computes the answer to a difficult calculation ahead of time and stores the output up to a specified size (ex. 1GB worth of digits of pi) . Proof-of-Space asks you to respond with a segment of the output at a certain offset. The amount of time given to respond is less than the amount of time it would take to calculate the output, and so by replying you prove that you had it stored already.

Thanks for this, I'm planning on watching Bram's talk but haven't had the time just yet. It's definitely an interesting idea, so I'm eager to see how it plays out.

Yeah, same. Competing with Bitcoin is a tall order, but Bram is a pretty smart guy so there's definitely a lot of potential here. Thanks to dpiers for the description below, too!

See the 'how it works' section for a brief description of Burstcoin's proof-of-capacity mechanism [1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731923.0

burstcoin does proof of storage already.

I'll note here that at least one "proof-of-capacity" coin already exists:

http://www.burst-coin.org/

I can't elaborate either on the merits of proof-of-capacity vs. proof-of-capacity plus proof-of-time.

Beyond the tech, it brings a somewhat famous person, which is not to be underestimated. Hype is important, it makes this coin pop out a little bit more than some of the others competing for the same mind share.

Filecoin and sia are not proof of storage. They are both proof of work, in fact filecoin runs on Ethereum. Not sure about Storj or Maidsafe.

I was confused. I thought chia was going to be also a storage mechanism. I was pointing out those coins that are built around the idea of storage.

That said, Filecoin does use some form of proof of storage:

https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

You need the proof of replication to show that a storage contact is being fufilled, not to secure the chain of blocks. proof of replication could be adapted to protect the chain, but that's not how it works at the moment. At least as far as I can tell.

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