If that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market?

And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity.

It looks just like another proof of waste

Persistent storage doesn't have to be powered on all the time, though, which makes the environmental impact a known thing. Factor in the cost of building + populating the drives along with having to replace them periodically and you know the cost of that storage. In comparison, PoW's future cost can skyrocket as the network expands and the difficulty goes up.

Storing the whole chain takes a bunch of space anyway, so you have a similar storage problem there too.

If you want to see how cheap persistent storage can get, look up the cost of Amazon Glacier. It's shockingly cheap - $0.005 per GB or even less.

It's a known quantity, sure, but IIRC hard drive manufacture was not necessarily a very "clean" process.

Right, but ultimately the same is true for manufacturing GPUs and ASICs. It's a problem you have to deal with for both PoW and this new proposed approach.

Sure, but that's my point, I don't think the economic incentives for proof of storage are any better.

How can they not be better if they remove the need to burn a bunch of power 24/7 and produce waste heat? It's replacing an ongoing cost with a fixed one. In both cases you need a hardware investment (PoW mining hardware for one, persistent storage for the other) but the proof of work system ALSO has a large ongoing energy cost in addition to hardware.

GPUs or ASICs for hashing are going to have a limited life span just like your storage hardware, too.

In this case the storage hardware is more directly linked to the output proof. Much more hardware manufacturing would be involved.

In PoW you can lower your environmental impact by using clean electricity. For Proof of storage it would be 100% manufacturing.

I was looking into their whitepaper trying to find a counter argument to this. My conclusion is basically this:

The probability of being awarded a transaction is proportional to your reserved space 'plot' compared to the globally reserved space. Assuming it takes off, and enough 'overprovisioned' storage has been added to the pool, then it makes little sense to buy hardware just to farm storage-coins. The tiny increase in probability just wouldn't pay off.

This is the same proposition with PoW and hashes though, surely?

The main cost of compute is electricity.

The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside).

It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.

This doesn't sound right, it's very doubtful that all storage tech has royalty (unit-based) license terms.

Instead of electricity consumption the limiting factor will be raw materials to manufacture storage. Likely even worse for the environment given the energy and raw material cost to manufacture storage devices.

I was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.

overall it would be significantly less, that is the point

I'm not convinced it would.

Just like PoW it makes sense to spend enough until a breakeven point. In thise case there is a direct incentive to buy as much storage as possible.

I mined BURST for a while, another PoS coin. It's been around for 7 years, works great, and solves the PoW power problem. It's got a lot of functionality built in for the nodes, like messaging and marketplace functions.

And nobody cares. If I had to guess, I'd say the attractiveness of mining the PoW coins is that it's very expensive, but accordingly very rewarding.

When the coins are cheap and easy to secure as a node, people seem to not be as interested, which means the coin doesn't get used.

Chia, Sia, Filecoin all are trying to do similar, but have added in a "distributed Dropbox". There are some interesting challenges there, like quintuple redundancy and having your files stored across multiple nodes in shards for privacy. But in the end, they seem to suffer from the same issue as BURST: their feature set struggles to create popularity because they're not Bitcoin.

Any of these coins could have linked themselves to bitcoin. Ie. They could have issued coins at the start to all bitcoin holders.

If they did that, they'd get over the "we're not bitcoin" hurdle, assuming the tech was any good.

The best way is to have a way to "lock" bitcoin which can then be "imported" with a 1:1 exchange rate into your new altcoin.

That way there is no proliferation of coins, and people will have trust knowing each of your altcoins is backed 1:1 with bitcoin.

Isn't that riddled with the same problems ultimately?

You set up a system, which inherently ensures a certain resource will remain/become scarce (...for all of humanity), or fail. That's just super counter-productive for human prosperity...

main issue OP and other "I have a version of bitcoin that doesn't uses less energy/faster/cheaper etc." people have is that these existed before bitcoin and didn't work. They were shut down/coerced/coopted. Bitcoin ensures decentralization and finality via PoW. This new coin will take its place under bitcoin amongst 3000+ abandoned and newly released ones.

How does this differ from Filecoin?