What are Storage Miners?

Storage miners are cryptocurrency miners who provide nodes with enough storage to validate transactions and reach consensus. They do that because storage mining enables miners to earn money by simply storing data. To become a node of the blockchain network, a miner must dedicate a particular quantity of its storage space. Storage miners have the option of dedicating either cloud storage or hardware storage. This makes acquiring additional storage power and moving up the node rankings extremely simple.

Filecoin (FIL) is one of the most well-known cryptocurrencies that rely on storage mining for its operations. In order to choose suitable nodes, the Filecoin blockchain relies on the storage capacity of its miners. These nodes then operate as transaction verifiers and miners for newly added blocks to the chain. Validators for nodes are chosen based on the amount of storage capacity they can provide to the network. For successful block creation in Filecoin, storage miners win FIL tokens.

Members of the Filecoin blockchain use the storage that miners contribute to the network. That’s the reason why the consensus method requires all approved notes to demonstrate that they have the necessary storage capacity and that they always keep an up-to-date copy of the entire system on their servers.

Though it is not a common thing in the crypto world to entrust the node-selection process to a consensus method based on storage. Well-known blockchains usually rely on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus methods.

Even though storage-based consensus mechanisms are rarely used in the blockchain sector, Filecoin is proof that they actually work. Besides, the criteria for the type of storage power requested by the network is customizable, which provides great flexibility for storage miners. More established consensus mechanisms do not usually allow such flexibility in node requirements.