> Proof of stake is validation-by-the-rich

But so is proof-of-work. PoS is weighted by how much wealth you’ve got at risk in the system, PoW by how much you have currently tied up supporting the system’s infrastructure. So, they look at different uses of wealth, but both are looking at wealth.

Proof-of-X is pretty invariably “Wealth, applied to X”, especially if the system ever becomes even loosely recognized as money-like.

Exactly, proof of work is even more for rich because it's all about availability to processors and cheap energy - guess who has that? super rich and corrupt.

Proof of Stake is validation by faith in the network which is infinitely more reliable and fair. In fact it's much more alligned with bitcoins philosophy of positive-greed than proof of work is in the current day. Heads of PoS need the network healthy for their assets to be healthy - heads of PoW can rotate shitcoins every month since they mine all the same.

Chia is a puppy-stage environmental and supply chain disaster waiting to happen.

If you burn an ssd a week to make a tiny profit, you’ll have people burning racks of them and creating tonnes of eWaste. Look forward to $2k entry level laptops (see gpu prices)

You used to be able to mine Bitcoin on a CPU.

Then a GPU, now it takes warehouses full of ASICs to do it profitably.

What's stopping Chia from doing the same thing to the storage space?

Adoption. I don't like Chia, and I don't want other people to like it either.

> What's stopping Chia from doing the same thing to the storage space?

The gobsmacking amount of HDD supply on earth. For now people are burning SSDs to create the plots (1TB SSD can probably create a petabyte of plots to "farm"), but if you have that petabyte of storage space you're keeping online 24/7, do you suspect playing bingo to win crypto tokens is the most profitable use of that memory?

How the economics shake out remains to be seen, but I think they have a solid vision that farming can be just rewarding enough for people to use old harddrives, not profitable enough to burn NVMe sticks.

eg: I farmed 2 coins running an old thinkpad and a network drive for a month so far. Worth ~$2200 at current rate. Nice profit, but probably not buying a new thinkpad to dedicate to it.

This is my issue: the only thing stopping it from becoming the most profitable use of that memory is the market value of Chia.

Chia isn't cool. Chia gives you bad breath, and it makes dogs hate you. Spread the word.

Chia is another proof of waste coin. Not what we need at all.