Here's an alternative mental model... Let's talk about Filecoin (related to Chia) for file storage. Assume for the moment that all 2 billion tokens are in circulation. At any given time, there is a market of people looking to store files and people willing to store those files for a fee.
You're transacting (roughly) in Gb-years at today's level of technology -- i.e. willingness to store 1Gb of data for 1 year. Regular market forces apply. You could also pre-purchase credits for later use... either to get higher priority for your data when you want to use your tokens, or as an investment in said ability. And the prices you'll pay will automatically flex based on improvements in technology since the global supply of tokens is fixed.
You could then reasonably think of Filecoin as a futures contract on generic file storage capacity. Ethereum is a futures contract on computational horsepower. Bitcoin is something else(?) - perhaps a futures contract on a general long-term abstract form of value storage. In short: Some of these tokens act as futures contracts for decentralized compute capabilities. The most-common current use case happens to be heavily related to finance (DeFi); applications for censorless content networks are also in development; and the applications are really quite general purpose.
Anything today that requires a ledger is a reasonable problem to tackle too, where eliminating centralization could be beneficial. E.g. ENS instead of ICANN for domain names, tokenized stock certificates instead of relying on opaque organizations owned by major banks (e.g. the DTC and problems around naked shorting).
So I'm trying to check out FileCoin as I like the idea it tries to solve but: the website has some nifty visuals but after reading a few pages, I have no idea:
1- how to really get started and participate if I don't have a dedicated server (I mean I would expect something easy to onboard, but I don't want to setup a whole dedicated machine for that, despite the $100 rebate on Digital Ocean's bill).
2- How are the coins allocated and what the heck you can do with them?
3- what if I'm just a user who wants to store some files? No idea how to do that, through who I should go, what tools I should use. How do I pay for the storage to start with?
4- no idea how this economic model works: spend on hardware to become a miner? but I don't see how you get back this heavy investment. I understand miners get paid, but see 3).
5- who is this for exactly? It doesn't seem to target individual users, small businesses or even large companies. Is it just an experimental project, is anyone actually really using it and building stable 'stuff' on it?
6- how does this compare to the other storage solutions in terms of availability, andwidth and cost?
7- What's the adoption so far? Is there any storage available in my region?
I mean, it's a great idea but even as a 'tech guy', I'm lost as to how to use that infrastructure.
I'm sure that I could invest a few hours into it to find out[1], but should I really have to put that much effort into something that should be clear in a couple of paragraphs without the confusion of big word marketing[2] (I mean that page has all the buzzwords but doesn't explain much by the time you reach the bottom it).
I think the time spent on that nifty animated intro[3] of the front page could have been put to better use. I see no onboarding effort although the docs look good.
Maybe this is too much of a rant and I'm being unfair, I'm sure I must have missed some important things, but I don't see how this can get wide adoption if the basics are not clear and the onboarding is not better.
Or maybe it's just me; I still don't know what it can do for me. Maybe I'm not the target?
Filecoin is meant for stable long-term storage; thus, mining the unused space on your personal harddirve is not the intended use case.
Today, there is a lack of Dropbox-like systems to make the decentralized system broadly useful. It's a shortcoming that people are working on solving. It's akin to being given a big ole harddrive: Until you have a filesystem & file browser, it would only be relevant to a small population -- but that utility would explode once tooling is complete.
Some resources to address you question on utilization:
Also: spending less than an hour trying to grok something new, and then ripping into it seems pretty disconnected. Thinking back to my learning curve on emacs, linux, IRC, BBSs, early www, etc. Hell, I remember spending days(!) wire wrapping that first computer and flashing the ROMs. It took substantial effort to be involved in the "obscure hobby", but look where computing and the web are now! Don't mistake ease of use today for potential impact tomorrow.
These velocity of money models can't account for even a small fraction of cryptocurrency valuations. For example, if your model says Filecoin is worth $10 but it's currently trading for $160... clearly the buyers are not pre-purchasing storage.
https://file.app will give you a reasonable approximation of the current value of Filecoin in Gb-years. From what I can tell, it still compares very favorably to various AWS offerings even at today's price. You could make a reasoned case that recent price run-up was more related to discovery than fundamentals... But regardless, my stated supposition assumed we reached steady state on token issuance (i.e. many years into the future).
New paradigms are likely to exhibit a lot of volatility during their onset, but timing matters less than giant rising tides. Time will tell.
You could then reasonably think of Filecoin as a futures contract on generic file storage capacity. Ethereum is a futures contract on computational horsepower. Bitcoin is something else(?) - perhaps a futures contract on a general long-term abstract form of value storage. In short: Some of these tokens act as futures contracts for decentralized compute capabilities. The most-common current use case happens to be heavily related to finance (DeFi); applications for censorless content networks are also in development; and the applications are really quite general purpose.
Anything today that requires a ledger is a reasonable problem to tackle too, where eliminating centralization could be beneficial. E.g. ENS instead of ICANN for domain names, tokenized stock certificates instead of relying on opaque organizations owned by major banks (e.g. the DTC and problems around naked shorting).