Haha yeah, I wish the Chia guys would put something in the FAQ about this because it's a common criticism. I've heard them make a convincing case that, unlike C

Haha yeah, I wish the Chia guys would put something in the FAQ about this because it's a common criticism. I've heard them make a convincing case that, unlike CPU cycles, there's actually a lot of over-provisioned space on existing consumer and enterprise hard drives. And unlike Bitcoin, Chia can actually be mined ("farmed") by anyone with extra space on their drives because the technical requirements are so minimal (there are people mining petabytes off a Raspberry Pi, for example). The Chia team also seems to think that if Chia actually does scale to the point of significantly altering production resources, it would be likely to just drive down the price of storage for everyone since there's no specialized hardware that makes mining Chia economically worthwhile. Plus unlike the bitcoin mining hardware, you (or corporations buying lots of drives) can use the storage space for things besides Chia. I have no idea myself if that's how the economics would work out, but it seems likely we'll find out — the network is currently at 200PB and growing: https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/netspace https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/netspace Love your work by the way! Hope you're well.