[imtringued]

Yeah, the problem is actually worse. Bitcoin is energy intensive. Chia is capital intensive. Producing capital costs energy so it effectively boils down to proof of work (burning energy to produce HDDs and SSDs). However, scaling energy is very easy, scaling HDD production is very difficult.

The only benefit is that storage can be repurposed very easily, thus booms and busts may cause temporary oversupply of storage.