I'm not sure if you're interested in discussing or just want to do a drive-by criticism, but that's actually an interesting question! Currently 1.5 zettabytes

I'm not sure if you're interested in discussing or just want to do a drive-by criticism, but that's actually an interesting question! Currently 1.5 zettabytes of new HDDs are sold each year which is around $65 billion. So HDDs are a pretty mature market with massive data centers buying most of that storage. One of the hypotheses with Chia was that there is a lot of over-provisioned storage already out in the world — on both consumer and idle enterprise drives. This is in line with the original intent of Bitcoin that anyone could mine which would make the network more secure. It's obviously cheaper to use existing storage to secure the Chia blockchain than to buy new drives so the market will move toward maximally using existing storage. Datacenters could use their existing idle storage for Chia farming before a more lucrative use came along. And the storage doesn't need to be very reliable for Chia farming, so old hard drives that are no longer viable from datacenters can be used (apparently datacenters just destroy HDDs outright currently?) Currently there are about 35 exabytes of storage in the Chia network, which is about 2-3% of the entire yearly supply of HDDs. Given that supply chains weren't really disrupted, I think it's pretty safe to say that the Chia bet was right and that it's actually utilizing a bunch of unused space already out in the world. And the IDC agrees: https://idcdocserv.com/US47836321 https://idcdocserv.com/US47836321 Now, obviously if the market valued Chia extremely highly then supplies of HDDs would be impacted. But I wonder how much that would affect everyday folks like you and I since most storage in devices are now SSDs, which are not very storage-dense so aren't really as economical for Chia. Would it be the case that consumers couldn't buy HDDs? At some coin price, yeah, definitely. I have no idea what that price could be.