Burst network difficulty rose roughly 1600% or 17 times after the PoCC took the lead developer role and attracted fresh blood around the protocol. Sadly, Burst only managed to attract more and more miners instead of actual businesses and economic activity. The struggle is understandable, given how the coin’s reputation was tarnished and persisted long after the scammers left the scene. With block rewards shrinking fast and a relentless bear market mauling Burst market capitalization, suddenly nobody was profiting from mining anymore, not even large scale operators. So suddenly a very large Burst mining group from somewhere in China decided to code-fork Bitcoin and shoehorn the PoC2 consensus used by Burst in it mixed with a staking system which was a first in the PoC domain. A “copypasta” coin with no real intent of creating an economy behind it other than mining/speculation, riddled with bugs, inherent centralization issues and a fixed inflow of coins mined going straight to some shady “Foundation” wallet — an abomination called Bitcoin HD. The icing on the cake is of course the closed-source nature of the wallet, and the fact that mining requires you to give your passphrase to a pool. Never mind the irony of having to trust entities in a supposed trust-minimizing system.

The Bitcoin HD scheme

And there’s the thing, in PoC you can mine several coins using the same plot format, at the same time, in a process called collision-free mining. Bitcoin HD developers made this backdoor possible with their stupidity. Imagine back in 2011 if Litecoin was launched using SHA256 as the hashing algorithm… well, to be fair, not even this analogy would be as bad. Because what BHD did was create a sort of nothing-at-stake situation for the Burst miners, who suddenly could mine another chain without impacting their bottom line. And in such situations, some people can’t be helped, and greed devours the brain. Things got awkward. Miners and pool operators within the Burst community started being teeth and claws hostile to the developers’ actions to protect Burst as the apex PoC cryptocurrency in the space, because it was interfering with their BHD profits. All kinds of slander ensured — BHD was being “attacked” and developers where stealing from miners. Some miners, ironically the ones most profiting from the BHD scam, were smearing the developers by telling miners to leave their pools. At that point, there was nothing else to do but to step down and move on.

The problem is that such tragic chain of events made it evident that launching your own half-assed PoC copypasta cryptocurrency is a very attractive way to make easy money, with the added bonus that miners will always be sure to minimize the moral and ethical problems of participating in your scheme for you. Genius! To this day, more and more Burst clones exist “just because”. Some have been deemed a complete scam, but that doesn’t stop them from reappearing, and always from the same place. It seems like people found a way to hack their way to richness at the expense of everyone else. Inequality at the click of a mouse! Try for yourself!

So how can Proof of Capacity thrive and work in favor of mankind, when mankind fails to see the big picture? What to do when lots of competing scams disguised as financial security are in vogue, and a big portion of participants even believe they are not a net negative to the space? How can people benefit from a network based on PoC and how can a PoC network act as a monetary tool and “bank the unbanked”, when incentives are more skewed towards taking advantage of multi-chain mining through issuance of new networks and not actually unify, socially scale and build on top of one protocol? To this day, of all PoC blockchains, only Burst keeps attracting talent and is concerned in creating a real economy powered by its native currency. But its community is under constant social tension between its participants, given how even some community managers — which happen to be miners — openly promote coins like Boom and BHD.