Not sure what that has to do with BitTorrent. But anyways, are we gonna judge people based on what they use their hard drives for? How do you feel about people filling their drives with just porn or worse, just movies and video games?
It has nothing to do with Bittorrent, other than having been created by Bram Cohen.
I'm not talking about filling it up with useless or silly content though, running a Chia node will cause a hard drive to fail after a very short time. This isn't due to any legitimate usage for storing content, it results from how they implement proof of space. It's been a while since I read about this in-depth, but basically it amounts to having the nodes fill the drive with junk data and then prove they're participating by regurgitating some section of that data on request. Then on successive blocks, it gets rewritten with new data.
The irony is, I believe this was intended to address the environmental concerns of proof of work mining, and perhaps it does. But turning hard drives which require resources to create, into landfill, isn't really environmentally friendly either.
edit: To clarify, I'm not judging people using or participating in the Chia network (many participants apparently didn't even know it would destroy their hard drives). I am judging Chia's consensus mechanism for being wasteful however.
You're rehashing mainstream news articles that gloss over crucial details.
"Plotting" is the act of filling the hard drive with the random data. It only needs to be done once, after which the data can be used to "farm" indefinitely.
Farming is very low on energy requirements and doesn't damage the drives.
Plotting can be accelerated by doing it on a fast SSD, and transferring the plot data on large capacity HDDs for farming. This saves time at the cost of writing a lot of data on the dedicated plotting SSD, which trashes consumer grades SSDs if done continuously.
Plotting can also be done on the HDDs themselves. It's slower but won't noticeably reduce the HDD's lifespan.
When Chia was launched, there was a lot of speculation and farmers were competing to be first to finish as many plots as possible, so most were plotting on SSDs, and many on consumer SSDs. That's were the "Chia destroys hard drives" myth came from.
