Hello dear followers and fellow Steemians! In this post i'm going to cover Proof of Capacity mining! I've already covered the basics of The Blockchain Technology, Proof of Work (PoW) Mining and Proof of Stake Mining (PoS) so feel free to read those too if you are looking for more basic information about blockchain tech and cryptocurrency mining!

What is Proof of Capacity?

Proof of Capacity is a relatively new mining algorithm for people that don't really have a super powerful computer to do mining. PoC uses the users available hard drive space, the process allocates a certain amount of space to generate new coins and that space is used to store large pieces of data called "plots". The higher the amount of space the user allocates the more plots he will be able to store.

The coin generation method is like this, the network generates a number and then proceeds to look in all the plots (all the hard drives connected to the network) for numbers lower than the one generated by the network and all those plots of data enter in a sort of lottery and when 1 plot of data is chosen, the block gets generated and the coins are awarded to the miner.

There's a simple way to explain this, lets say I am the network and I generate numbers from 1 to 20. The number generated by me was 13, then everyone with numbers from 12 to 1 enters the raffle for a new block and the winner gets the coins.

One of the main selling points of Proof of Capacity is its accessibility to users, to start mining any PoC coin all you need is a hard drive with some space and you are good to go. You don't need to pay thousands of dollars a month of electricity bills to mine PoC because you don't need to run the hard drives at 100% of their capacity 24/7 like you would do with GPU or CPU mining.

You also don't really need to use SSDs or really care about the speed of the drives to mine efficiently, all you need is space, huge amounts of space and you can use any sort of hard drive from new 10tb+ hard drives to your old 80gb hard drive stored somewhere in your basement which has not seen the light of day since the past decade.

There are not many coins yet using PoC, the king of proof of capacity right now is Burst Coin and its not really that popular yet, but if you want some unsolicited advise from me, you should go out and buy a 10tb hard drive before a PoC becomes super popular and the price of HDDs goes to the moon just like what is happening to gaming GPUs right now, so cover your back and buy a huge hard drive before the prices get wild.

Advantages

• As said before you don't really need to go out and buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment to mine proof of capacity efficiently, you can use any sort of hard drive, you can even use your phone's hdd to mine them! all you need is space.

• Running a hard drive farm is way more efficient that running a GPU farm! Basically meaning that while you mine PoC coins you are also being more eco friendly than people mining Bitcoin and other PoW cryptos.

• There is no need to upgrade equipment, old hard drives and new hard drives work, all you need is space and if one day you decide to stop mining, all you have to do is delete the data in the hard drive and it will be ready to use, not like GPUs which after a few months of mining (depending on the quality) are almost dead.

• Can promote even more decentralization because everyone has hard drives so everyone can theoretically participate in the mining process (but you can still become a big player, in the next few years i wouldn't be impressed in PoC mining farms start popping up with petabytes of storage capacity)
  

Disadvantages

• Hard drives that are currently mining become useless for storing your files.

• The technology is relatively new and untested, its barely starting to get some adoption.

• Non miners can become even more susceptible to malware, just like there are malware to mine bitcoin on your computer, there could also be malware to plot your hard drives and use them for mining.
  

Thanks for reading this far down! I hope you enjoyed the read :-D, Help me improve by leaving a comment with suggestions and if you liked it please upvote, reesteem and follow me for more in the future! Here's a list of my other posts if you feel like checking them out!

• The Man with the Highest IQ to Ever Walk on Earth

• John Titor: Time-Traveler or Hoax?

• The Old House by the Forest

• Flags of the World #9 : Australia!

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All the pictures in this article where sourced from Pixabay, a royalty free image source!