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Persistent storage doesn't have to be powered on all the time, though, which makes the environmental impact a known thing. Factor in the cost of building + popu
by kevingadd 6y ago
Persistent storage doesn't have to be powered on all the time, though, which makes the environmental impact a known thing. Factor in the cost of building + populating the drives along with having to replace them periodically and you know the cost of that storage. In comparison, PoW's future cost can skyrocket as the network expands and the difficulty goes up.
Storing the whole chain takes a bunch of space anyway, so you have a similar storage problem there too.
If you want to see how cheap persistent storage can get, look up the cost of Amazon Glacier. It's shockingly cheap - $0.005 per GB or even less.
- Nursie 6y agoIt's a known quantity, sure, but IIRC hard drive manufacture was not necessarily a very "clean" process.
- kevingadd 6y agoRight, but ultimately the same is true for manufacturing GPUs and ASICs. It's a problem you have to deal with for both PoW and this new proposed approach.
- Nursie 6y agoSure, but that's my point, I don't think the economic incentives for proof of storage are any better.
- kevingadd 6y agoHow can they not be better if they remove the need to burn a bunch of power 24/7 and produce waste heat? It's replacing an ongoing cost with a fixed one. In both cases you need a hardware investment (PoW mining hardware for one, persistent storage for the other) but the proof of work system ALSO has a large ongoing energy cost in addition to hardware. GPUs or ASICs for hashing are going to have a limited life span just like your storage hardware, too.
- jobigoud 6y agoIn this case the storage hardware is more directly linked to the output proof. Much more hardware manufacturing would be involved. In PoW you can lower your environmental impact by using clean electricity. For Proof of storage it would be 100% manufacturing.