I think it's funny how the world as a whole just simply moves the problem (excess resource usage for something a lot of people have deemed 'excessive' like bitcoin mining) from one type of resource to another. Now we're going to see storage costs skyrocket, which will (hopefully not) affect cloud storage providers, datacenters, etc. etc. etc.

That would be a bummer, but if it doesn't exacerbate the energy/co2 problem I consider it a net benefit.

Manufacturing SSDs and platter drives is definitely not carbon neutral. Let's not even get into the problems with rare earth material extraction...

In order to be considered a net benefit, it only needs to emit less carbon than compute-based mining. It doesn't need to be carbon neutral (and indeed, I don't think anyone posited that it was).

That's a pretty low bar. To be a net benefit it should emit less carbon than traditional payment processing. If you set my house on fire you don't get to call saving my cat a "net benefit".

I don’t think you understand what “net benefit” means. It does not mean “the most optimal state”, it only means “better than the status quo”. In this case, the status quo for crypto is compute-based, so storage-based crypto is a net benefit if it beats compute-based crypto. Saying something is a net benefit doesn’t imply that it is optimal, so I’m specifically not suggesting that storage based crypto is optimal (indeed, I’m not even sure it is a net benefit; I only said “if it emits less carbon, then it very likely is a net benefit”).

How much carbon is emitted by traditional payment processing?

As an example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

I'm sure modern, all digital, methods like Venmo or PayPal use even less.

Less than the carbon that would be emitted by doing everything with physical banknotes, coins, and precious metals?

I'm extremely disappointed Bram Cohen is behind this. I used to really admire him for his work on Bittorrent but this is going to be an indelible asterisk on his legacy as a coder.

So every conclusion to hard drive also applies to electricity? How do you establish the equivalency?

Computational resources too Actually pretty close to what some scifi writers envision(The Golden Oecumene by Wright comes to mind)