[rglullis]

I am sorry. Just like I am missing how someone would work on a farm without any expectation of return on their investment, I fail to see how "there is profit to be made", however you want to call it.

Also, with farming at least there is the notion of resource constraints. To be a farmer one needs to have access to land and dedicate some time to actually work on it.

With storage, unless the hard disk manufacturers start holding their production and use it to offer storage directly, what is the resource that other people can't have?

What would stop anyone to see that Filecoin network bids of (say) $1/TB-month and think "oh, I can buy some disks and offer $0.95/TB-month, and I will get my money back in 3 months", only to be outbid by someone who thinks they can offer $0.90/TB-month and recoup costs in six-months", until we get to the point where the time to break-even gets longer than the lifetime of the disks...