urstcoin vs itcoin

Is burstcoin a thing?

Burstcoin is a crypto currency that uses a unique proofing algorythm that revolves around mapping storage instead of purely mining with your CPU, in short, you can look at it as HDD assisted mining.

Work is performed by reading a collection of blocks from prepared hashes stored on the computer and announcing proof of capacity used.

This has attracted many miners to take part in the block forging process, giving Burstcoin an active community that all have a stake in its success.

What is the Burst network like at the moment?

The network in its current state is similar to how bitcoin was when it was entering into its GPU era: civilian mining.
Because people can still mine burstcoin and successfully gather some during this phase of the network's growth, and given that there are technological limitations on the time it takes to scan prepared hard drives versus their size.
The benchmark of data storage size versus the ability to read all prepared hard drives in time is an elegant way to constrain over-centralization of mining power.

At the time of writing, block rewards are in the range of 1500 Burst, which is about 15 dollars worth on todays market. On a pool, our tests using 2.6TB yielded between 2 and 20 burst a day, and rewarded us with 750 Burst for a solved block one lucky day.

Most miners generally dedicate between 2TB and 100TB of hard drive space and the rewards can vary greatly. At the current value of the currency, buying Burstcoin is likely cheaper than mining it if it requires the acquisition of equipment, however if there is unused hard drive space available, it can prove to be an effective way to defray the running costs.

Uses for the currency

A potential use for Burstcoin is to mine using unused space on servers that are already connected and running, allowing the equipment to produce their return on investment faster.

Another use would be for power users who have massive hard drives in their workstations. Some people are already using mining as a way to pay part of their graphics hardware, Burst has the potential for additional reward for unused hard drive space.

Burstcoin has also has asset management, smart contracts, messaging and shopping built in to its network which should indicate that there are a lot of potential uses for this coin.

What does this mean looking forward?

Burstcoin has shown an interesting resistence to specialised hardware and centralization, which bodes well for its future, it contributes to an interesting phenomenon in the scene: how trends in crypto currency mining are raising the bar for manufacturers to produce ever more powerful and denser hardware in order to satisfy power-hungry miners, economically fueling the advancement in computing power. (efficient and powerful machines can pay for themselves, returning their investment)

SSD drives are planned to outrun HDD drives in density during the next few years, which is a indicator that the more power-and-noise efficient Burstcoin will become an even stronger competitor in the cryptocurrency mining domain in the years to come.