Crypto Academy Week 13 - Homework Post for [Crypto Professor @alphafx]

What is a consensus algorithm?

A consensus Algorithm is just a mechanism that permits users or computers to agree to a particular value during execution. The consensus algorithm is wildly used in the blockchain world to ensure a new block is added to the network. This can only happen when all the nodes in the network agreed to the only one correct value. Here all parties need to come to a common agreement(consensus) by trusting unknown peers. Remember, all this has to be happening in a distributed computing environment on the blockchain network. Consensus is an important aspect of the blockchain network to maintain the security and integrity of the system.

List of some consensus algorithm

• Proof of work
• Proof of stake
• Proof of brain
• Proof of capacity
• Proof of burn
• Proof of Authority etc

I will be looking at the proof of capacity(proof of space) mechanism and how it works.

What is the poof of capacity?

Proof of capacity is a mechanism where the use of hard drives and storage is used for calculations. Minner's users their hard drive to store the result of the calculation of the cryptocurrencies hashing. The capacity of the hard drive can influence the number of calculated results stored. The larger the capacity, the more calculated values can be store, and therefore having more calculated results increase the chances for more rewards for the miner.

How the proof of capacity works

Three stages:

• Plotting
• Reward assignment
• Mining.

I will be explaining my understanding of how these stages work during the algorithm.

Plotting is when the hard drive store a series of nonce(number only used once) values created through a repeated hashing of data. These plots contain the necessary calculated results, which are store on the miner hard drive. A nonce is made up of 8192 hashes ranging from 0 to 8191 and are in pairs.

Reward Assignment is when all miners join a pool to figure out who will get the reward eventually by getting a block. Like I mentioned, the more capacity and more calculated results, the higher the inner chances.

Mining is when the application used the data(plot) to get a block. This is a series of calculations for each pair of hashes store on the miner's hard drive. Timeline is allocated to each calculation process. The calculation whose results were gotten in the lesser duration is picked by the miner. In other words, it is a battle of time between the miners. This time is the time between the last forge block and the new block. So the lesser the time, the faster a miner forge a block and get the reward.

Advantages

• Miner can format the hard drive and used it for some other purpose
• Miner doesn't need to upgrade the hard drives since any available space can be used for storage. Remember, a higher capacity gives you a higher chance.
• it is efficient as compared to proof of work which uses ASICS in mining.
• Miner can use any hard drive to execute proof of space, even with Android-based hard drives.

Disadvantages

• This consensus algorithm is not popular and is limited in the number of developers using it.
• The fact the miners are using the hard drive, the chances of the drive been corrupt or attack by a virus is high.
• Hard drives due to malfunction and can course a delay and increase time for a miner to complete a calculation results

Example Burstcoin

Because the hard drive is easily available and very cheap. Anyone can join the Burst mining system. Here the miner uses the free space on their hard drives instead of an energy-consuming CPU.

Conclusion

This has been an interesting topic for me, I knew about Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. Proof of Capacity was new to me, I'm happy getting to understand how this consensus algorithm works on the blockchain.

Thanks, professor @alphafx