Yesterday, Spacemesh started circulating. Do you know about it? What do you think about it?
I have written this brief blog post to explain how it is different from other mainstream cryptos. Let me know if you have any questions.
(Also, this is my first post on Lemmy!)
I see your point. Yes, it feels a bit wasteful that the data is just junk and not something actually useful. But they are building a L1 crypto, which means smart contracts. AFAIK there are no proof-of-storage cryptos that support smart contracts yet.
As far as I understand, the GPU is required to deter setting up huge data centers with terabytes of data dedicated to Spacemesh, this network is optimised for small miners. And also they wanted to make sure that it’s cheaper to store the data than to regenerate it every time. In any case the GPU is only needed once, to generate the data the first time.
Differently from the other proof-of-storage, in Spacemesh the disk is idle 96% of the time, it’s only spin up once every two weeks. Less energy wasted.
It’s a different model, quite fascinating in my humble opinion 🙂