basicly in mining the vast majority of crypto's use CPU's , GPU's , to run at near 100% full time to do complex math problum's to make a block on the block chain, with burst you only do the math calculations 1 time and insted of throwing the info away and starting fresh each block. when you plot you are doing the math equations and saving them to the HDD as plots. when mining all you do is scan the plots and see if you have the magic equation to add the next block.. uses far less energy than any other type of crypto and the hard ware does not get burned up from being ran so hard all the time.