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Comment by rejschaap | Hacker News Reader

Proof-of-Work initiated an arms race to do more work. Proof-of-Capacity would initiate an arms race to have more capacity. And you still need to do work to prepare the proof that you have the capacity. On face value it doesn't seem to offer many benefits.

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The main feature that attracts my attention is that PoC claims to require orders of magnitude less electricity per block than existing PoW solutions. That, to me, seems like a huge benefit that reduces the need for participants to locate themselves near hydroelectric power plants.

However, to your point, it does replace a dependence on ASICs with a dependency on the HDD supply chain.

The work done is a feature not a bug. The fact that a miner has to locate their equipment by a hydroelectric power plant is what makes the network so secure. That just shows that work is difficult to fake.

All these efforts to limit bitcoin’s energy expenditure seem environmentally motivated, which is good. But the arguments seem equivalent to praising a safe’s security but criticizing how hard it is to open. Those features are linked.

Yes proof of stake or some other algorithm may take over eventually but we don’t know if they are as secure yet. Proof of work is the good idea that made the whole bubble possible and it remains to be seen if any of the other ideas can beat it.

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not suggesting that Bitcoin (or Proof-of-Work) is broken or bad or unsafe or even a bad investment.

Rather, my original question was why Proof-of-Capacity has not seen stronger adoption given that it appears to provide similar security guarantees with better decentralization properties due to a lower $/W/block cost profile.

The $/W/Block profile is where the security comes from. Insofar as a miner can spend dollars to increase their chance of getting the block, they will, until MR=MC. See this article which explains it very well, though it is talking about PoS: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

"PoC claims to require orders of magnitude less electricity per block than existing PoW solutions"

Ok, but a "block" is not a set amount of value or effort, is it? The way I thought Bitcoin and anything similar works is that the resource requirements are adjusted in a feedback loop. If some other scheme is 10x more "efficient", then whatever the operation is that is required, it will just be done 10x as much.

I may be misunderstanding, but it sounds to me like saying "company A uses much less electricity to generate a share of stock than company B".

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