Basically what Helium is doing for IoT networks, could be done for carbon capture machines aswell. Helium sells branded radio modules, "miners" provide network coverage and get paid for this in Helium(coin)
CarbonCoin (patent pending) could do the same, produce or white-label carbon capture machines, add logging modules to keep track how much CO2 is captured and pay the owners of these machines in CarbonCoin.
There is no alternative to proof of work because that uses an EXTERNAL permissionless resource available all over the universe for a reason. And it does it in a matter that's provable via a concept known as unforgeable costliness.
Not only is mining permissionless, it's costly to everyone. At equilibrium the mining costs force miners to sell virtually all coins and depend on the markets for recovering those sunk costs just to break even. That means miners are literally forced to give up control to the markets and makes the coins equally accessible without permission via mining or buying on markets forced through unforgeable costliness. The markets, and coin owners, get to price incentives that pay miners on every possible version of the chain preventing many issues including miner collusion that could render sunk costs unrecoverable.
Proof of stake is opposite - it literally forces a permission be given by every token put up for sale, something they never have to do. Staking rewards literally incentivize opposite of distributing control to others by giving you rewards in form of more coins and more control without any additional costs forever.
Proof of work is the most efficient way, the only known way, and the best known way to decentralize control. And it uses far less energy than entire countries regularly use to secure their currency, all in adversarial environment.
The biggest challenge for real decentralized cryptocurrencies is lack of education and enormous incentives to deceive and miseducate everyone for profit. This is why there's so much money these days spent marketing scams that pretend to be cryptocurrencies but are centrally premined (literally skipped permissionless mining for majority for permissioned centrally pre-mined coins) or trivially printed authority token designs like proof of stake all completely permissioned.
Nice recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAa1vKyVR5M
there's a reason ethereum has always been considered a scam by every developer in the space that wasn't a premine scammer
I like https://chia.net, even if hackernews was just panicking about a harddrive shortage (proof of space) I can't accept that playing bingo on terabyte drives will ever be profitable enough to buy a data center for it.
Anyway it's the programmability (chialisp) that is really interesting.
But so is proof-of-work. PoS is weighted by how much wealth you’ve got at risk in the system, PoW by how much you have currently tied up supporting the system’s infrastructure. So, they look at different uses of wealth, but both are looking at wealth.
Proof-of-X is pretty invariably “Wealth, applied to X”, especially if the system ever becomes even loosely recognized as money-like.
Proof of Stake is validation by faith in the network which is infinitely more reliable and fair. In fact it's much more alligned with bitcoins philosophy of positive-greed than proof of work is in the current day. Heads of PoS need the network healthy for their assets to be healthy - heads of PoW can rotate shitcoins every month since they mine all the same.
If you burn an ssd a week to make a tiny profit, you’ll have people burning racks of them and creating tonnes of eWaste. Look forward to $2k entry level laptops (see gpu prices)
Then a GPU, now it takes warehouses full of ASICs to do it profitably.
What's stopping Chia from doing the same thing to the storage space?
Adoption. I don't like Chia, and I don't want other people to like it either.
The gobsmacking amount of HDD supply on earth. For now people are burning SSDs to create the plots (1TB SSD can probably create a petabyte of plots to "farm"), but if you have that petabyte of storage space you're keeping online 24/7, do you suspect playing bingo to win crypto tokens is the most profitable use of that memory?
How the economics shake out remains to be seen, but I think they have a solid vision that farming can be just rewarding enough for people to use old harddrives, not profitable enough to burn NVMe sticks.
eg: I farmed 2 coins running an old thinkpad and a network drive for a month so far. Worth ~$2200 at current rate. Nice profit, but probably not buying a new thinkpad to dedicate to it.
Chia isn't cool. Chia gives you bad breath, and it makes dogs hate you. Spread the word.
Only when the energy impact of crypto currency is dealt with will i indulge in speculating that it can be a net good for humanicy