>The key difference is that there is a lot of overprovisioned storage out there currently sitting idle

From where? Individuals or enterprises? With the direction we're headed (SSDs and cloud storage), it's hard to imagine many people with a few terabytes of hard drive space. On the other hand you can get around cheap hard drives at around $15/TB if you buy external, then shuck them so you can put it in a backpane or something. At that price, it's hard to beat the price of a new drive, especially if you factor in the time it takes for the individual to set it up. Enterprises might have better economies of scale, but I'm skeptical that executives would sign off on running arbitrary code on production servers just to earn some cryptocoins.

It's becoming more and more popular for hobbyists to have at least double-digits of TB of storage sitting around for various purposes. I'd gladly make some profit out of the part of my array that's not filled up yet.

Curious, what purposes here? What kind of hobbyst we are talking about?

The usual "Linux ISOs" storage, self-hosted cloud services, data hoarding of all kinds (https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/), probably original content creation for those who don't want to pay for/use cloud storage (photo/video/audio editing and creation). I'm sure that there must be more, but this is just the ones I know off the top of my head.

Both enterprises and consumer drives have over-provisioned storage, yes. Enterprises obviously have a lot more and it will take a while for them to trust that Chia is a good way of using their unused storage until a more valuable use of their storage space comes along (like an Amazon customer requesting S3 space or something).

It also seems likely that flash storage will become cheaper than HDDs in the next ten years, which will start increasing SSD space on drives due to increased competition. Analysis here: https://wikibon.com/qlc-flash-hamrs-hdd/

The idea that enterprises have tons of "over-provisioned" storage is hilariously cute. Do the Chia guys really think engineers at FAANGs haven't found ways of using that storage for something useful? :-)

Storage workloads aren't uniform. Some need to have localized, reliable, consistently performing persistent storage with room to absorb sudden demand spikes (like customer data on cloud clusters). Others can be stored anywhere and moved with ease, with few requirements on latency, redundancy on a global scale, and read-mostly workloads, which means immediate loss of a single local copy is harmless (like YouTube videos). FAANGs have long since figured this out and how to optimize their storage utilization.

There is zero chance one of them is going to up and decide that Chia is a better use of their "spare" (not really) storage capacity if they have anything resembling competent engineering teams. I know Google does.

Source: Xoogler.

Not all enterprises are FAANGs and the immense majority operates at a tiny fraction of that scale.

While I don’t think too many businesses will buy this idea of using spare storage for “cryptofarming”, unused resources are pretty common.

The price of a cryptocurrency will tend to roughly follow the cost of generating it. In storage, it’s safe to assume the cost will only go down for the same amount of space. And disk space has been growing faster than transistor density for some time now.

Unused resources are common, but this kind of thing is only valuable at the scale at which you already have engineering teams doing useful stuff with the storage. Smaller enterprises are not going to be deploying "cryptofarming", there is no way it would be approved in the vast majority of orgs.

So in the end this is going to be just like every other cryptocurrency: people largely deploying exclusive mining (sorry, "farming") capacity and consuming resources doing so.