Hello everyone, this week we will talk about the consensus tests specifically of the Proof of Capacity and thus fulfill the task proposed by @alphafx for the tasks of week 5 of the 2 season of the crypto academy. This type of consensus is unique in that it uses the storage level of a hard drive to mine a coin that uses this technology instead of using the power of data processing, but to delve into this, let's start from the beginning.

This consensus is nothing more than a new form of mining, in it the free space of a hard disk is used to instead of processing the mining it is immediately stored in this space for further processing, and in this way to be able to successfully mine the coins As well as making it easier, it also becomes faster.

As mining coins consumes a lot of energy, new methods and ways are being implemented to achieve this mining of coins that consume less time and energy, that is why new methods have emerged and the Proof of Capacity is one of them, it was created precisely thinking about reduce the time and energy that is normally used in a normal PoW mining where the computing power of a PC or machine is used to mine causing them to consume a lot of energy.

The Proof of Capacity has the particularity that as you use more space to mine more rewards you will obtain, that is why the sales of SSD hard drives have increased in recent months since many seek to achieve rewards thanks to these hard drives.

This mining process occurs in two phases, the first of which occurs a writing of a list of possible names, these nonces are numbers that are used only once, this process is long and takes time depending on the capacity of your hard disk, in This list lists the values of these transactions, bringing together a total of 8192 hashes ordered one by one in pairs, these pairs are called scoops, these go from 0 to 4095

The second step would be the final mining of the coin, in this process we seek to calculate a random number of scrop and the nonce is listed 1 to 1 until all are calculated and these scrop are used to calculate the term or rather the The time it took to mine the previous block, and how long the mining process of the next block will last, it should be noted that each nonce has a total of 8192 hashes and 4095 scroops, Here is a graphic example of the explanation.

Advantages

• The main advantage is that this mining system can use any conventional hard drive, although logically if the hard drive has more capacity and is faster the mining process will be more efficient.

• As everything runs on hard drives, you do not need to be updating your equipment, the only thing is that if you want to have better performance you will need to use more hard drives.

• As it is stored data, it can be erased if you need to use your hard drive for another purpose.

• This algorithm is not very popular and is just becoming popular, although there are many campaigns against this system as they claim that they damage hard drives, and that if a hard drive is purchased and used for this purpose the hard drive loses the warranty.

• The difference and optimization of modern discs against older ones is not much so the difference and mining performance is not much.

• Investing in this type of mining is cheap, which is why more and more people are engaged in this type of mining.

• The energy cost is also an important factor, since with a single machine you can have several discs and most of the new discs require little energy to work.

• Those inventions in specialized mining equipment will not give them an advantage in mining since everything is done on hard disk, this makes this style of mining one of the balanced ones, and the rewards are distributed equitably.

• Most cryptocurrency developers do not opt for this option.

• It could create a production chain of higher capacity hard drives, that would increase the value of said hard drives

• Since everything is stored on the hard drive, malicious software could damage data or search for vulnerabilities

• In the proof of work consensus, the energy consumption is tremendous since a large number of mining machines are needed and keeping these machines at room temperature is an energy challenge that all miners always face, something that does not happen in Proof of Capacity since current hard drives consume less energy every day and are faster and with greater capacity.

• The Proof of Capacity all the magic happens on hard drives, and in the use of storage this can be a disadvantage since if a malicious software damages the hard drive or some sector is affected, sometimes it is almost impossible to recover it, something that does not happen in Proof of work since everything happens in the GPU of the equipment and does not store important data since it processes it instantly.

• In Proof of work you need to invest large amounts of money to have mining power, something that in proof of capacity does not happen since with 1 simple hard disk you can already perform simple mining since it is not necessary to update hard disks as the process difficulty increase.

• The existence of new projects in Proof of Capacity is reduced since it is a relatively new protocol, therefore it is not very attractive for developers, while Proof for work, being an older system, is better worked and super studied by most from the developers.