[dannyobrien]

So the initial capital investment is supported by the value of the coin, and that's what gets the network to its current capacity of c.17 EiB (https://dashboard.starboard.ventures/dashboard ) . Committing storage to the network gets increases the probability of gaining new filecoin, so there's always an incentive there to grow the network's size, and once you have that storage available, there's an additional incentive to seek out deals to use the space.

I'm not an economist, so I can't speak to the details of the balancing act, but the incentive system is engineered to create a balanced equilibrium -- so more demand increases the incentives to provide storage, etc. It's a challenge to follow all the thinking, but this video from ZX Zhang is a good guide to the current state (I fast-forwarded it to the relevant bits: https://youtu.be/gbJgsav2lP0?t=554 ). There's also one of the regular cryptoecon days coming up in Paris, and the videos of those are kept online. https://www.cryptoeconday.io/event-schedule/cryptoeconday-et... https://www.cryptoeconday.io/videos

[dpe82]

The network doesn't exist in a vacuum and that 17EiB isn't free. People had to buy real hard drives using dollars (or whatever) and they have ongoing opex to keep them spinning and connected to the network. Those dollars come from somewhere. If you're getting storage from the network for less than the amortized capex and opex of those drives then it's being subsidized, either by the owners of the hardware (if they're mining at a loss) or by people buying filecoin for purposes other than paying for storage.