Browsing the Chia FAQ, it looks like the Chia organization is busy pre-farming Chia coins for themselves with plans to loan them to companies to use:
> Why are we pre-farming?
> Chia has a novel business model to both, lower volatility of the coin and increase adoption. By loaning Chia and managing the interest rates of those loans as well as other tools like buying our stock with chia coins, we hope to lower the quarter to quarter volatility of the coin. To drive adoption, we intend to loan Chia to Global 5000 companies who will use it to pay their international vendors quickly, less expensively, and more securely.
This idea that companies will need to borrow a volatile currency to get payments done faster feels like a joke. Why must every fast payment scheme use arbitrary tokens with floating exchange rate instead of simply tapping into existing banking systems and representing existing currency holdings? No serious business wants to put a volatile cryptocurrency on their books just to transact a tiny bit faster.
I see Bram Cohen got the original authors of "proof of space" or whatever this is to author papers with him, and also got inflationary pressure in there, but if that's the extent of research, well, that's still not how the economy works. At least ransomware gangs won't switch from encrypting to deleting stuff altogether for space.
Furthermore, the ROI on hard-disks bought just to mine this may be decades as there is already a glut of unused hard disk space. So there's no hard disk shortage to be expected.
As downsides to chia I see
1) the huge premine.
2) the large complexity of the proof of time + proof of space system.
3) the fact that the mining chain cannot commit to the tx history (instead the miner's private key signs for a block of txs as belonging to the mined header)
Otherwise, it's just people with more money getting the same percentage returns as anyone else, which is actually a better situation than legacy banking (where bigger accounts get better rates) or proof of work (where there are physical economies of scale).
the problem is that this creates at best a concentric circular pattern of ownership (and thus leverage over liquidity), even if everyone involved is completely honest and ownership is 100% transparent. in reality it's far worse than that because pseudo anonymous address ownership means claims of "fair distribution" cannot be trusted let alone proven.
decentralization is a mirage.
I'm sure you're right.
I think WWII was horrible, but it might have kickstarted civilian aviation.
California's PG&E electricity prices are a travesty, but there is a real market for solar panels in california, which means solar R&D is being funded.
Chip shortages are causing real investment to be made in fabs now, which means better designs and cheaper products 10 years from now..
Electric cars need batteries, so battery tech has gotten a real boost and we get better batteries for all kinds of other things.
The pandemic ... mRNA for cancer?
An increase in the demand for SSDs will result in an increase in the production of hard drives. The construction of these hard drives requires energy, and this energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels.
Just another nail in Bitcoin's coffin.
but I do have 16TB of NVMe SSDs so..... hmmmm, I guess that's fine since I already own them
