About the growing popularity of mining using storage space…

Chia is the first popular cryptocurrency that is mined using storage space, and to me it looks like it's becoming an existential threat to all crypto:

• It has turned even more people against crypto by causing hard drive and SSD prices to skyrocket.

• It's going to attract even more ire from environmentalists, because it has added yet another source of pollution on top of what we already have. It's not like GPU miners will be like "Hey, there's a green alternative now, let's all just stop mining!"

• Cloud providers have long-term supply contracts, but once they expire, or if it becomes profitable to just sell storage to miners, there will be less space available for web sites, leading to free content becoming paid, paid content becoming more expensive, more ads, more DRM, etc. Worst case, it'll cause the end of Internet as we know it, and crypto will essentially become universally hated.

Naive journalists still think that "it might also mean graphics processor prices come back down", but it'll soon become obvious to everyone that this ain't going to be the case, and government bans are the way only to end hardware shortages and pollution.

Posting here because I've heard Ethereum will soon go mining-free… I think proponents for mining-free crypto should start proactively advocating for bans on wasteful crypto, before things get really out of hand, causing people to get really mad and just ban crypto entirely… Just saying…

Disclaimer: No interest in cryptocurrency, just want this insanity to end sooner rather than later…