With how easy it is to get crypto loans now with minimal collateral, attacking pos is no doubt even easier.
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Do you think it is that much harder to setup a HDD factory than to setup your own chip design/manufacturing? I am very familiar with semiconductor design and production. I am not so familiar with HDD manufacturing, but I donāt think it would be that hard if you have a couple of hundred millions available.
This is about state of the art semiconductor fabrication. I have worked in semiconductor manufacturing. Setting up a modern fab takes many billions and is very hard. But you do not need that for HDD manufacturing. And in particular for Chia one does not need particularly high performance HDDs. You need just adequate for farming. Thus your comparison is false. If Chia actually makes it into the big three crypto coins I predict that you will see new HDD manufacturing startups.
No, this particular argument isnāt about HDD factories. Itās about ASIC design.
You could indeed set up a factory to make HDDs. What you couldnāt do** would be to design a new type of HDD that would give specific advantages to Chia farmers, AKA an ASIC.
This is an argument in favor of Chia vs Bitcoin.
** Probably. I donāt think this has been proven yet and Iām aware that many have claimed to design ASIC-resistant systems and failed.
Yes it is more work, but the capital is about the same. With capital you hire the people who do the work. Buying coins in large quantities isnāt that easy either, because you will drive up the price which will make it harder to buy more. It is procedural easier but it is a minor difference. The proof is what happened with bitcoins. If it happened there, certain groups setup their own manufacturing, it can easily happen with any other consensus algorithm. That is all you need to know. Chia is in no way better protected against such centralization and control efforts.
Of course you could. You could design a cheaper HDD only geared for farming and no other uses. Just a small example, todayās HDDs have cashes and all kind of hardware to make it faster for the typical use as a computer storage. For Chia none of this is necessary. Strip out all that unnecessary fluff and produce a very cheap HDD made for farming. With this it will allow certain groups to purchase or use HDDs for much cheaper than the average farmer can do. That means these big players can increase the network space to a point where it is not anymore profitable for the average farmer. They will drop out leaving the field to the big players. And now you have your centralization. It will happen just like with bitcoin. There is no inherent protection for it.
A little lesson in economics. Any commodity will be compete down to marginal cost. Chia farming is a commodity. Anybody can get a HDD plot and farm. That means as long as there is profit to be made space will be committed to it until there is no profit left. The only way to make a profit at this point are operational efficiencies. Meaning those who can procure electricity at a discount and those who can purchase or manufacture their own HDDs at lower cost. Big players have the advantage there. Thus the same centralization will happen unless you want to deny basic economical mechanisms.
Cmon your being daft now , you donāt need your own fab to get chips produced.
That is true. But that was the comparison storage_jm provided. Of course, you use the services of a foundry to get your ASICs made.
OK, this post makes sense to me. Itās the first time Iāve read this type of argument about the possibility of a Chia ASIC. Thank you.
Iāll wait to see if anyone else can rebut it.
I would say let me see your calculations, but you know as well as I do, you have none. Same as solar panels? Solar panels last years and years, and take no where near as much energy to create, as they will make over those years. These ignorant statements show why no one should take you seriously.
Todayās Chia FUD: HDD manufacturing orcs are coming for your Chia 
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I hope Chia is so successful that 3rd parties will pour billions of $ into inventing lower-cost archive storage (Facebook and Microsoft would be very happy too!). This would be a net benefit for society.
WD and Seagate are already trying. There is a huge demand for write-once ready many storage, with large capacity and low power. You are doing a disservice to how complicated HDDs have become. There are only 3 vendors for a reason. (also, to your point, it is very much treated like a commodity)
Thank you guys, job is nearly done, keep pushing and the price of Chia will drop to Ā£160 and I can buy another 6 
The capital isnāt locked up though, you give it to WD or Seagate, who pays employees and contractors with it, who then go buy groceries or iPads with it et al.
Making a purchase is not, in any way, equivalent to locking up capital in what is effectively a LIRA.
That is a fair point. However, I see staking equivalent to all the money that is sitting in various bank accounts. Money in a savings account would be pretty much equivalent from an economical point of view to staked funds.
It is important to keep in mind that staking must also come with a cost, otherwise everybody would be staking everything and the currency becomes useless because nobody would be using it besides staking. Thus the fact that staking incurs opportunity costs and other economical costs is a good thing.
Bank accounts arenāt static, you put money in and the bank flows it right out as loans (30-33x what you put in). That creates velocity, not impacting it. When you stake Eth2 it just sits there.
I thought cryptocurrency was invented in part to avoid inflation. That whole lending system that banks can lend out multiples of what they hold in savings is part of the problem crypto tries to fix. Loans are the primary mechanism that increases the total amount of coins in a currency and thus is the engine of inflation. It is a very good thing this canāt happen with cryptos.
So (following your logic) fractional reserve banking is bad because it inflates the supply. Cryptos solve this āproblemā by having a fixed, or at least predictable, supply.
But the benefit of fractional reserve banking is that multiples of the original deposit continue to circulate.
The argument on the table is that staking is bad because it stops money from circulating, whereas PoW and PoST donāt have this problem. Miners/farmers spend large portions of their gross earnings on equipment, electricity, etc. Thus the supply continues to circulate.
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If you look at the entire system it is a non-issue because the economical activity you are looking at, miners buying stuff, will happen with staking somewhere else. Folks that would have mined will find other things to do.