Storage Miners: Vital Roles in the Filecoin Network

Storage miners are cryptocurrency miners who rely on providing sufficient storage space for nodes to achieve consensus and confirm transactions. Mining in the cryptocurrency world is a very important process. Depending on the consensus mechanism used in the blockchain, there are different types of mining. Vault mining is one of the many types of cryptocurrency mining.

What are Storage miners?

Storage miners is a type of cryptocurrency mining that allows miners to earn rewards for storing data on personal servers or devices. One of the basic concepts of vault mining is that miners must dedicate a certain amount of storage space in order to qualify to become a node in the blockchain network.

One of the most well-known cryptocurrencies that depends on storage mining is Filecoin. The Filecoin blockchain relies on the memory capacity of miners to select suitable nodes. These nodes then serve as transaction verifiers and miners for new blocks that are added to the chain.

Entrusting the node selection process to a consensus mechanism based on data storage is something of an experiment in the cryptocurrency industry. Most popular blockchains rely on proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms. However, blockchains such as Filecoin use storage capacity as a measure of node compliance. Node validators are selected based on the amount of storage capacity they can offer the network. As a result, nodes or storage miners are rewarded for mining. In the case of Filecoin, storage miners receive FIL tokens for successfully creating a block.

The storage that the miners allocate to the network is used by users of the blockchain and the Filecoin system. It is for this reason that the consensus mechanism requires all approved miners to be able to prove that they have the required amount of storage and that an updated copy of the entire system is on their servers at all times.

Remarkably, storage miners can choose which storage they want to allocate - cloud or hardware. This makes it incredibly easy for storage miners to acquire additional capacity and advance in node rankings.

Storage-based consensus mechanisms are rarely used in the blockchain industry, but Filecoin proves that such a system can be successful. In addition, customisable requirements for the type of capacity requested by the network give miners considerable leeway. This flexibility in node requirements is typically absent in more established consensus mechanisms.