Waste of space?
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I'm developing a bit of a conscience about dedicating HDs to issuing Burst deadlines. Burst is touted as a 'green' coin, but it makes HDs useless for any other use and so is hardly ecological. This issue became relevant to me after acquiring some 6TB WD drives from eBay for £75 - a sweet deal (thanks Pacifica). I've decided to use them for STORJ instead of Burst, giving them a more meaningful existence and one that will also reward me with crypto.
TBH this IMO is a flaw with Burst - could we develop a way of combining proof of capacity with giving the drives something useful to do. I'm no quant so this may be technically unfeasible, but could an algo produce deadlines based on the kinds on shards of data that STORJ disseminates to give the Burst ecosystem a useful purpose?
Which leads me to a question. I'm trying to persuade my ex employer (The BBC, our national broadcaster here in the UK) which has a tech show called Click to do a story on Burst. They also have World Service TV & radio that reaches an estimated 350 million. I'm intrigued by the Wiki Burst page which states that the founding developer is unknown, which obviously gives the story some sale-ability because of the similarity to Satoshi & BTC. If anybody can link me to more info on this or is willing to discuss the matter privately please PM me. If you wish to remain anonymous I can assure you that will be so. If the story is commissioned I don't see how I can avoid discussing the rift between team & nation, and I think Adam will be have to be consulted because, love or hate him - he seems to be the primary marketeer of Burst.
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@ArthurThePug Storj puts your drive space to "use", but it still makes it unusable by you. If you offer 8TB to Storj, then you need to leave that 8TB available. Unlike Storj though, you have an idea of how much you'll earn from your Burst storage, with Storj you get paid based on the amount they use - if they don't use any space, you're being paid nothing for the storage you can't use.
The Burstcoin developer created the first few versions, then disappeared. No one knows who they are/were. Since then it's been a community controlled coin, with a collection of developers co-operating and working together to further develop it.
If a BBC story was to be done on Burst, my personal preference would be to leave Adam out of it - despite his primary marketeer of Burst, his history and persona would be a major turn off for many, and potentially harmful to the coin.
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Good points, well made Haitch. STORJ is currently using 40mb of the 18TB I allocated it & I didn't know they paid on usage and not allocation. However I have only been online with them for 48 hours & their network is in it's infancy - so I will give them some time to prove themselves. Do you think using our space for anything besides DLs is impractical?
I have a great deal of respect for your opinions (and asset!) so I take your remarks with due gravity.
Other's have contacted me privately to ask me to leave Adam out of it, and if the piece is commissioned on it's technical merits I would so. But the journalistic integrity drummed into me by the BBC cannot ignore this ingredient in the story, and he is very watchable in action. Having said that I am a miner of and an investor in Burst & have the interests of it's community at heart. In which case I may not be impartial enough to do the story. But any journo I handed it over to would have to made aware of all the issues. Also bear in mind that the prevailing view in Britain is that Bitcoin is a bubble & we have other things to worry about, so I would honestly say the story has a 50/50 chance of airing.
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@ArthurThePug Yeah, I looked at Storj, and it's pay for use, and they gave me virtually no use.
As for Adam, that's my personal preference, I can understand a journalist seeing him as a juicy detail to amplify the story - just wonder about the repercussions.
As for BTC being a bubble, it's possible the price is, but it's been stable fr a while, and BlockChain technology is here to stay, so I don't see any devaluing of BTC in the immediate future.
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@haitch 'I don't see any devaluing of BTC in the immediate future.'
you're preaching to the converted ;) Any thoughts on other possible usages of Burst space?
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The reason storj works is that they own all the tokens that will ever exist. You don't mine storj tokens nor forge transcations on a blockchain they just piggy back on BTC.
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@ArthurThePug Worked for auntie eh, very cool.
Click would be massive exposure for Burst. I think the program goes out on BBC world as well.
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Isn't there a possible storage application in BURST? Possibly to implemented in the future? I'm not a techie but thought I remember reading that somewhere.
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@burst1 There was discussion of it, but it would be a massive technical undertaking. I'm not sure what the state was at the end of the last discussions.
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I would like a bit of storing capability if just to store some stuff on blockchain (ahem, contacts am looking at you) :)
As is its the same deal as with GPU, if you mine with one its no much use for anything else. Green aspect comes from power consumption.
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@ArthurThePug Here is an article I wrote introducing my LinkedIn followers to Bitcoin and more particularly the advantages of BURST. You may use it as you see fit. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curious-bitcoin-other-new-currencies-start-reading-here-mcdonald
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Burst also has the advantage of being low bandwidth not just low power. If you wish to use that space for a cloud storage token you're going to need the upload and download speeds to accommodate it.
If you have 50TB on storj it might take weeks or months to be able to swap that data over an average residential data connection, which is completely impractical for a home bulk miner. Assuming there is also the demand to fully utilize your storage in the first place.
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@ArthurThePug A couple of other quick random thoughts. At this stage in the game I think we are dealing with enthusiasts. And yeah, enthusiasts will go out and buy hard drive space. Burst will get to the stage where there are just "users". Those users will mine with their existing hard drives and will use BURST as currency.
That is going to be the power of BURST. Small miners that have not invested in any specialized equipment, and are mining with computers and hard drives that already exist. And if someone stops mining BURST, those drives are perfectly good for regular old storage.
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@ArthurThePug I think you are missing the point, Burst is green in the aspect of power usage.
For example a GPU mining rig with 7 GPU's will take about 1.4Kw power. + external cooling
A Burst rig with 100-200TB will use about .1 to .15Kw peak power (when reading plots), it will use even less when waiting for the next block.As they both run 24hrs x 365days so the energy saving is significant.
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Storj is in charge of renting the disk space, I think they are 25GB for 10 dollars. Those 25GB are divided into parts, encrypted and sent to multiple disks so that if one fails nothing happens and remains available.
So every 10 dollars each user gets a small part.
While it was in beta phase I had 500GB shared and full but at the end of the beta phase happened to have only 50GB used.
To test hire a VPS server and in a month I have only managed to fill 4 GB.
So with burst your profits depend on what you want to invest and in storj depends on whether there are people willing to pay for the service.
Also when it started storj to be able to participate in the beta had to pay 50000 storj so I guess these users will have preference.When I had 500GB I got about 10 dollars to change them for Bitcoin, so if you could fill an 8TB disk would clearly be more profitable than burst, but this does not happen and what is shared is minimal, I consider it a help and nothing more, At least for now
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@themattmc13 Not only few miners have hundreds of TBs and some have more then 1PB. We have left behind some time ago enthusiasm era.
Same like in BTC, in the future BURST mining will be only for few who already choose to heavily invest in hardware. The rest will mine through cloud mining and here come into place Asset Exchange. @ccminer and others like him will be the bridge.
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@burst1 would be cool AF if i could mine my 30TB of anime i mean right?
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Burst as it works today is not wasting the capacity - it's using it to provide a global, save and fast transaction network of value without a third party. That main feature itself is useful.
Burst uses a previously unused resource that everybody has to some extend: free disk space. Now you can use a previously wasted resource of your computer to mine coins - or better: to participate in securing a transaction network, for a reward. The network will for sure have lower fees than any proof of work coin because the total operating costs (electricity) are much lower than for any ASIC or GPU secured blockchain.
If we keep growing like this, there will arise a capacity market on top of Burst. The algo don't has to be changed for that. All we need is a software on top that brings supply and demand together: An exchange for capacity.
Imagine Burst network being one of the biggest distributed "data center" in the world (in the future):
There will be demand for capacity and Burst miners may offer their capacity (+ bandwidth) for someone else if their reward is higher than the mining reward. Preferably paid in Burst. ;) So what this project actually did is put a price tag (opportunity costs) on free space. I don't see that kind of market nor utility for GPUs or ASICs.The founder of Burst designed the distribution time of the coins almost like Bitcoin's but more softly. He disappeared almost exactly a year after start. Have a good read: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=364787;sa=showPosts
Burst won't solve all problems of society but it's not as exclusive as ASIC mining or power hungry as GPU mining. Everybody can go in a shop nearby and be part of it.
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@daWallet Well argued. FWIW my 5 day experiment with Storj is at an end - they only ever filled up 50mb worth of space & the (very poor) software deactivated drives without my intervention. So I'm returning 12TB to the Burst network - of course I was stupid enough to reformat the drives and now have to re-plot them. Live & learn.
As for the proposed BBC Click story, thanks for all the PMs I got - mostly requesting that the Nation / Team aggro be left out of it. I did so & offered a piece based on Burst's technical innovations alone. They told me it was too inconsequential an idea at present, but would keep Burst on their radar. You can express your desire to see a Burst story by tweeting to @BBCClick or leave a message on their facebook page, but space them out over time or they will think it's an attempt to pump the coin!
My own enthusiasm for Burst is re-invigorated so thanks to all folk here who put in their 2 cents worth.
ATB, AtP
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got some change in my pocket so here goes, gave storj a try, there was never demand for my drive for first couple weeks(100mb maybe), then out of 1 tb i allocated to test it, about 90gb were used. the rate was low, at 2 month point was getting closer to 200gb, and there was an update, so i updated and it lost the config for the previously allocated and used space. it also crashed my win10 m18x laptop alot...... it is junk software, i like the idea but they need alot of work. i have been in I.T. for over 30 years now.... storj software in the real world is somewhere in between alpha and beta test phase, there "alpha" seemed to be proof of concept stage, which is just really pre business plan/model stage. either that or there real world test was very much a lab like environment. just my thoughts, and for good measure, i think i have forged around 25-28 blocks this year, and recieved over 47000 burst, so not bad..... and the nice thing it piggy backs on one of my gpu rigs, nice way to help pay for electricity =)


