i did the math on this with the recent price pump, and it's very short, if you account an hhd that cost $240 like the seagate of 8TB and give you 6k burst per month at the current value of 800 satoshi per burst, you have almost 0.05 btc in one month, which are $80 or so, this is a 3 month roi, electricity is not something that matter here so i excluded from my math, to me it look pretty good, what do you think?

After long time it got volume in four digits on Bittrex what is the reason of recent spike ? What is going on someone here knows something to tell interested people like me. Burst coin is here for long time and at start I also was active then lost interest due to other projects. Today saw its volume crossing over 1000 BTC awesome.

There is no "key" to backup in Burst. It's NXT based blockchain. Effectively, your password is your key, and once you've chosen your password, there is no changing it. So make sure you've created a very strong password! Otherwise, simply choose a new one, create a new wallet with it, and simply send yourself any funds/assets you might have had.

Feel free to stop by the forum if you have more questions! https://forums.burst-team.us  

Does anyone have a working link to dcct's plot optimizer? Only finding broken links

You should be able to find it here: https://forums.burst-team.us/category/9/burst-software
Blago made a backup on github https://github.com/Blagodarenko/plot_optimizer_1.6-j6jq

I suggest you try Xplotter, will create optimized plotfiles directly:
https://forums.burst-team.us/topic/3002/xplotter-for-optimized-plots-cpu

I would really like to get into mining burst - I currently have 2TB.  Please could someone kindly advise the best miner and pool to point to?

many thanks

2TB is a good start when it comes to mining Burst coin and there are a couple of pools you could join that the minimum TB's is low. The links to the pools are below and I'll also post a link that has all the pools and there recommended TB's to join the pool and get deadlines.

http://burst.lexitoshi.uk/

http://pool.burstcoin.ml/

https://www.burstnation.com/wbb/index.php?thread/395-pool-list/

Good luck with mining.

I believe so.
Proof of Capacity is an excellent consensus algorithm.

You're entitled to your oponion... but the HDD space is used to mine BURST... it's a very eco friendly, green, low resource concept compared to others.  Storage aspect may be something down the road.

There is an asset exchange you can invest and trade BURST for dividends.  And your comments about what the coin is used for... can be said about a lot of crypto.

BURST has essentially only had some significant marketing the last 2 - 3 months... and it was on a consistent rise before the latest jump.

There are devs that are highly invested in the coin, been dedicated and working for a long time now...all coins get pumped but what you're implying I don't find to be true with BURST.