Jim noted:
about the disk-usage characteristics of this new kind of storage-crypto to know what the cost trade-offs are. Can most of the 'disk' reads/writes be cached? That would certainly minimize SD card usage, and thus limit the wearout mechanisms.
Some of these proofs of space are essentially precomputed rainbow tables. The computed outputs can be sorted and binned across a lookup hashtree divided across the entire storage extent. There are typical tradeoffs in sizing those indexes which could be cached. But eventually you will exceed the cache and have to start doing real reads to see if you have the answer to the challenge. https://www.chia.net/ Most new cryptos these days are corrupt founders-get-rich scams upon the fairness they claim in their advertising. Some people are saying Bram's Chia is also a massive premine. Satoshi did not premine anything, the Genesis was cut and the network instance announced and launched for all interested parties to freely mine thereafter. Plenty of profit available to earlies, no premine or investment rounds needed to create a coin.
https://www.techradar.com/news/exclusive-seagate-exploring-possible-new-line...
The only thing they can do to increase capacity for this incompressible cryptorandom data beyond current commercial offerings is to sell a line offering higher error rates, lower data rates, and lower drive lifespan, while keeping seek times in scale. Such drives might be priced less per byte, but they will never be priced any less per *reliable* byte. If you wanted to get in the biz, you could imagine resurrecting larger diameters, such as these horribly unreliable drives... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot combined with 100+ platter horizontal spindles riding on multiple oil bearings, then airbag chassis suspension so you could stack gangs of them on concrete floors like old IBM units without crashing heads from harmonics, people, trains, bearing destruction in adjacent units, etc. Consider also if tape is cheaper than disk, layering tiers of RAM / SSD / disk indexing, into massive perhaps even parallelized tape extents... all while trying to beat the race condition of your competitors on the network. But you'd have to cut me in on the profits for the ideas. bitcoin-btc:1JjWdsFAWB4UDZXFMpHQ5sqNMSvWah8S9q