No. This is something entirely different entirely.
Mining a cryptocurrency goes something like this: spend a ton of money investing in a state of the art server farm, hook server farm up to mining pool to earn Bitcoin, withdraw Bitcoin for money, spend money to upgrade your now obsolete server farm.
In addition to being needlessly inefficient, server farms are causing significant harms to the environment in ways that traditional currency does not, and is causing increases in electronics and electricity prices due to their high demand.
Proof-of-Stake is a way to solve this. Instead of computing power determining who creates the blocks (and earns the transaction fees/block rewards), and instead of miners spending Bitcoin to make Bitcoin, miners put their cyrptocurrency in a form of a lottery, with the winner writing the block without using any computing power. The result is the same, but much more efficient and without the environmental cons. It also may make the network more secure, since an attacker would need 51% of the wealth in the network in order to compromise it. And even if someone gained 51%, they would not attack the network because they have the most value to lose.
This article is also about using a lottery, but for a very different purpose. Microtransactions are difficult with current solutions, because vendors like PayPal, Visa, and Cryptocurrencies usually institute minimum fees. This system get around this system through the use of a lottery. As an example, instead of paying $1 to 10 different sites (say in a pay-per-view of newspaper articles), you pay with a reverse lottery ticket. This lottery ticket has a one in ten chance of winning, and if it does you have to pay $10. The resulting payment is the same, but all your payments are in large sums so that transaction fees are taken care of. If the newspaper receives 10 reverse lottery tickets, they will receive equivalent profits to charging each customer $1. Therefore, the customers pay the same and the sellers receive the same, but without transaction fees eating up nearly as large a percentage of the transaction that a micro transaction would.
Both systems use a lottery powered by blockchain randomness, but the similarities end there. The purposes and the meaning of the lotteries are completely different. In the case of the latter, it is actually a lottery you don't want to win.
