Interesting. There are a bunch of variants, but it seems like there are three main ways of handling crypto.
Bitcoin is proof of work, which of course requires a lot of electricity.
Some coins, like Neo/CutCoin are proof of stake, which basically let you stake some money, which I guess you can't spend and use that to handle transactions, so instead of running mining rigs, you just stake the money and earn a return. Ethereum is planning to move to proof of stake. Kinda like how your FDIC insured bank can loan your deposit out.
Chiacoin, is proof of space and time, IE proof of assigned storage through the use of stored data, plus a verified delay function (slow to calculate, fast to verify hashing basically). The latter part needs only one processor, so whoever calculates fastest is accepted, so you aren't running a bunch of miners racing to benefit.
I'm not sure that I see the benefit of proof of space and time except in the case of things like filecoin, where you are basically paid for storing stuff on your hard drive without changing it. Chia coin is, if I understand things correctly, just sticking random numbers on a SDD to "farm" them. I mean the VDF stuff is cool to be sure, but it seems like in the case of Chia it's just wasting memory space with random numbers rather then incentivizing storage of existing data.
Is there a better system than proof of stake, in terms of just not being absurdly wasteful in terms of energy or storage capacity?
For the purpose of responsible disclosure, I do have less than $20 bucks of ethereum atm, and that's the only amount of any coin mentioned above. I have no investments in the companies behind any of the above coins.