Storage miners are participants in cryptocurrency mining that involves storing data on their servers or devices in exchange for rewards.
In storage mining, miners allocate a specific amount of storage space to become eligible as nodes in the blockchain network.
Storage-Based Consensus Mechanisms
Storage-based consensus mechanisms in the cryptocurrency industry are considered somewhat experimental.
Most popular blockchains utilize proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms. However, blockchains like Filecoin employ storage power as a measure for node eligibility.
Nodes or storage miners are chosen based on the amount of storage power they can contribute to the network and are rewarded with mining incentives.
In the case of Filecoin, storage miners receive FIL tokens for successfully creating blocks.
Users of the Filecoin blockchain and system utilize the storage dedicated by miners.
Therefore, the consensus mechanism requires approved nodes to prove their storage power and always maintain an updated copy of the entire system on their servers.
Flexibility and Customizability
Interestingly, storage miners can choose between cloud storage or hardware storage.
This lets them quickly acquire additional storage power and improve their node rankings.
Storage-based consensus mechanisms are not commonly used in the blockchain industry.
However, Filecoin demonstrates the success of this system.
The customizable requirements regarding storage power give storage miners significant flexibility, which is not typically seen in more established consensus mechanisms.