FOUR you say?

You can be mining with these four different methods CONCURRENTLY! And if you count GPU/CPU separately, its actually five methods!

What comes to mind when you think of someone mining crypto?

Probably a small data-farm filled with ASICs or a custom built GPU rig with like 8 1080Ti's, right?

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1) Proof of Work

In a sense, yes, that's good old proof of work (PoW). The oldest and best known type of mining where complex alorithms are calculated via brute force (making hundreds/thousands/millions/billions/trillions/quadrillions of guesses - also known as hashes - per second).

This method is tried and tested, it's highly robust, and it was part of Satoshi Nakamoto's vision for the perfect cyptocurrency.

As you can imagine however, this process is very power hungry, it results in the vast majority of your power going to complete waste.

At the minute, I mine GPU friendly algo's such as Equihash, x17/x16r and Timetravel with my GPU, and CPU friendly algo's such as Cryptonight with my PC for maximum efficiency. I also plan to mine Electroneum on my phone when mobile mining is released on the 5th of March.

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2) Proof of Stake/Masternodes

The next best known form of mining after PoW is PoS.

PoS is making it in a big way, not only does it mean people are likely to hold a coin which in turn increases the value, it makes the coin into an income source.

PoS is often promoted as a greener way to mine, and it is, thanks to it being far more power efficient - no wasteful brute-force algorithms, just wealth, age and luck are used to decide who produces the next block.

However, it is still unknown if current PoS methods are 100% secure- luckily for us, it punishes nodes that are found to be ill-acting so it could be very costly to abuse a PoS network.

There is also the problem that many blockchains require you to hold a large amount of the coin for you to stake (e.g. Ethereum will require you to hold somewhere in the region of 1000-1500 Ether which is equivalent to about $1,000,000-$1,500,000) - this means the rich will always be getting richer and the wealth cap will widen at that point.

This steep entry requirement that only the richest in society will be able to meet will also leave the fate of the network in a few select hands - people are aptly worried about network centralization.

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3) Proof of Capacity

I know, I was shocked too.

Proof of capacity/space means you can use your hard drive to mine a cryptocurrency! So I have my CPU, GPU and my HDD all mining for me - nothing is put to waste!

PoC is yet another green alternative to PoW and it works by calculating hashes once (same way as PoW) and storing the results on a hard drive. When the miner is given work, instead of calculating the result, they just look it up on a drive. For a more detailed description, see this extract from the Burst coin website:

For those who have not studied Proof of Work, a brief summary is that a Proof of Work is a calculation done that proves that an immense number of calculations (aka work) went into creating it. In Proof of Work systems, miners continuously run numbers through a hash function looking for inputs which produces outputs that satisfy some set of constraints. In Proof of Capacity, miners do this work once up-front (this is called plotting), and save the results which they can continue to use for each block without the need to work continuously.

Mining is the act of using these plotted hard drives to power the network. While mining, miners package all transactions they see on the network that have not yet been submitted into ‘blocks’. Then miners pull those Proofs off of the hard drive using a predetermined set of rules and submit them to the network. The end result is that the more hard drive space you contribute to the network, the more power you have over it.

Burst coin is currently the only coin I know of doing PoC, it doesn't come without drawbacks though, the software is feature rich, yet still very buggy and needs a lot of work before it is ready for consumer use.

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4) Proof of Blogging

Ok, the 'Proof of' bit isn't necessary...

A wise steemian by the name of @gtg has said on multiple occasions, "Blogging is the new mining". And he's 100% right, when you have every component in your PC mining, what else is left?

The computer in your head!

Instead of computer algorithms and maths, you can use creativity and networking skills. Money can't buy true originality and creativity. The beautiful thing is that you can make money blogging on steemit with even the oldest PC and no starting capital!

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sources:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake
https://www.burst-coin.org/proof-of-capacity

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