If Filecoin works (still haven’t shipped), then it’s unclear whether it’s less wasteful than PoW. This is because coins are mined by using up hard drive capacity, whether or not useful data is stored. The theory is that it will be better to store useful data for people because miners will get paid for that in addition to the mined coins. You could have a situation where 99 percent of the storage used in Filecoin is storing junk.