(On Legitimacy of Blockchains - 15)
Will spatial consensus algorithms such as PoSt (Proof of Spacetime) or PoC (Proof of Coverage) eventually rise above the impregnable fortress of already popular Web3 solutions such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and manage to claim their legitimacy in terms of reliability and sustainability?
From a technical point of view, they seem to be reserving a solid ground of reason to support such a conjecture. By integrating the intrinsic limitations of physical entities to the system's means of operation, PoSt and PoC have been quite successful in ensuring the safety of their protocols in a classy, 19th century's natural philosophy type of confidence, not obscured by apparitions of ghostly cryptography which have been poisoning the sanity of our scientific minds ever since computer scientists began to turn themselves into esoteric code-interpreters during World War II.
What is for sure is that physical states of things such as data storage and hotspot coverage are significantly easier to be understood and therefore be appreciated by the general public. Most people (including a significant proportion of those who are fairly well-versed in the field of computer science) are not fond of trusting complex exercises of number theory as means of carrying out their important financial/legal operations; they want a level of conceptual transparency which can be comprehended with relative ease.
This, of course, comes at a cost of installing and maintaining physical apparatus such as a dedicated section of a hard drive for PoSt or a wireless transmitter for PoC, yet it is mostly a negligible nuisance because most home computers and home routers are capable of carrying out such tasks.
A real downside of these physical means of consensus is that they, too, are bound to risks of plutocracy. Just as transactional processes in PoW (Proof of Work) or PoS (Proof of Stake) blockchains can be monopolized by a single disproportionately large pool of computing devices or a large reserve of capital, PoSt and PoC protocols can easily be monopolized by traditional landlords who possess enough chunks of land to either dominate a PoSt network by filling them up with data centers, or dominate a PoC network by filling them up with hotspots.