"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We have that rule because it's extremely easy to fall into imagining this sort of thing based purely on a few data points one dislikes. In the absence of evidence, that's likely what's happening. Moreover, the submission histories of most of the accounts that posted those threads is evidence against what you said, and that information is public and trivial to check.
This is untrue, Chia requires wasting storage space to store pointless garbage.
Definitely not a submarine.
"People are buying hard drives to farm despite price increases, it must be profitable, maybe I should buy one too..."
The part introducing the term is at the beginning:
"Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms."
If all the usual crypto charlatans aren't "to the moon"-ing it, that is a strong indicator of value for me.
The reason it is getting play on HN and other tech focused outlets is because it is an interesting new project from the designer of BitTorrent, who clearly knows a thing about designing protocols.
I think you are confusing Chia with Sia
Not sure what is the proper etiquette if I realize my initial statement was false is some way, add a new paragraph addressing the issue or just edit the original post to reflect updated stance?
New paragraph could add confusion
Editing the initial post might make it seem like I'm trying to look smarter than I actually am.
Overall, I am inclined to say that this is a submarine and HN is falling for it.
Regardless, more to the point of the article, the argument and moral panic rings hollow. Chia just incentives other people to store data for people who want to store data. The place, overhead and mechanism of data retrieval is different, but, still, someone wants to store the data there and they pay for it. So how then is this more of a threat than cloud providers for example?
Later Edit: I mistook Chia as having a similar approach as Filecoin, but, on closer inspection, it seems that they do not store data people want they just store data to prove it's stored and use that to distribute mining rewards. So I was wrong at this end. Still, I maintain my opinion this is a submarine.