From the article
Simply owning more hard drive storage does not necessarily equal more effective mining power on the [filecoin] network.
…
there appears to be no transparent way at the network level for retail investors to see how much of their purchased storage hard drive is actually effective mining power.
This is an important point they’re making. What it means is the network can say “you are not allowed to decide how much work you are going to do”. This is the network limiting itself rather than letting the users say “we want to put this much value into the network”. Imagine rocking up to filecoin with 100 TB and only being allowed to fill 5 TB. That would be super frustrating.
It would be a shame for SAFE to repeat this mistake. Rather than say there are 8 redundant copies of chunks (and no more), we should be aiming to say there is a minimum of 8 redundant copies but there may be more if farmers see value in more redundancy (like the idea in rewardable cache / deterministic cache).
If users want to put 1 PB of drive space to work (assuming they have the bandwidth etc to sustain it) but the network only needs 100 TB for chunks, what do you think those users will do with the remaining 900 TB? They’ll mine filecoin, or chia, or burstcoin, and to me that is the real waste. It’s far less wasteful to have them use that space to increase redundancy and security and performance on SAFE. And it’d be a FU to the other networks, our excess data is worth more to farmers than your primary data.
I just really don’t want to see farmers turned away from deploying their resources. It doesn’t make sense to me, especially since they’ll find some other way to use them which would be better spent on SAFE.