[mandelliant]

The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't think they're trying to be that).

While Lisk, Nav, Dash, etc do use alternatives to proof of work, what Chia is doing, from my understanding of what they're saying, is using the lowest cost alternative to proof of work, which is proof of storage (disclaimer, I don't know the math behind proof of storage, just that it's their alternative to PoW). However, proof of storage alone has some inherent vulnerabilities so they compensate with another mechanism, proof of time (again, not sure of the math).

Edit: punctuation

[craigc]

Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense.

When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens.

Curious to read about and see how that works

[dpiers]

My understanding is that your computer computes the answer to a difficult calculation ahead of time and stores the output up to a specified size (ex. 1GB worth of digits of pi) . Proof-of-Space asks you to respond with a segment of the output at a certain offset. The amount of time given to respond is less than the amount of time it would take to calculate the output, and so by replying you prove that you had it stored already.

[mandelliant]

Thanks for this, I'm planning on watching Bram's talk but haven't had the time just yet. It's definitely an interesting idea, so I'm eager to see how it plays out.

[awch]

See the 'how it works' section for a brief description of Burstcoin's proof-of-capacity mechanism [1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731923.0

[mandelliant]

Yeah, same. Competing with Bitcoin is a tall order, but Bram is a pretty smart guy so there's definitely a lot of potential here. Thanks to dpiers for the description below, too!

[chrisallenlane]

I'll note here that at least one "proof-of-capacity" coin already exists:

http://www.burst-coin.org/

I can't elaborate either on the merits of proof-of-capacity vs. proof-of-capacity plus proof-of-time.

[polyomino]

burstcoin does proof of storage already.