What is Proof of Capacity (PoC)?

Proof of Capacity (PoC) is a consensus mechanism that uses a miner's available hard drive space to decide its mining rights and ability to validate transactions. Through the PoC mechanism, a list of possible cryptographic mining solutions is stored in the mining device's hard drive even before the mining activity begins, with larger hard drives being capable of storing more potential solution values. PoC was designed to mitigate the energy inefficiencies and computation requirements of classic Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanisms as well as the crypto-hoarding that can sometimes arise in various Proof-of-Stake (PoS) configurations.