Actually I agree that there will be a burst. But do not agree that this is a problem.
People are generating a lot more personal data today then they were 5 years ago, mostly more than the last year. 50 years ago in 1974, the university (whole, with some 18,000 students & facility) was storing their data on a 40 & 80MB drive. I take photos that are 30MB in size, so 2 photos swamp that and if I store the RAW & JPG of the photo then less than 2 photos. 3 years ago my photos were 10MB. And people renew phones every 2 or 3 years in general and the phones too have been increasing image sizes years on years. I just did 1TB of videos of my construction of replicas over the last few days. Thats an increase of my whole data store by 2% in one week and expect another 1/2 to 1 TB by end of the week.
So, no, I do not agree that the consumer data drop by a significant degree. All the 10 year olds will be 15 in 5 years and generating a ton of data and larger than their elders did a year or two before. Generally speaking consumer data is increasing at a faster rate than doubling every 5 years, prob more like 4 or 5 times.
A burst yes, but the rate of storage will still be well above die off levels.
And for commercial, the partners are commercial. Also unlike BTC which was crypto, this is storage, not a crypto project. The commercial sector will evaluate and some within a year or 3 (prediction based on experience), be using Autonomi as part of their 3 2 1 backup scheme. From there they may start incorporating it as storage of non-critical (time-access, security) data stores. Many web sites may use it for image storage.
As to covering power, I love how people somehow think using spare resources will somehow cause massive increases in power, etc costs. Incremental drive access is very very cheap power wise. Your computer is already running, it is already using the power. Running nodes may (note “may”) increase power usage enough to register a few dollars a quarter. Leaving your 5Watt led light on for an hour will be more power usage than nodes for days.
If people want to go beyond using spare resources then its on them to decide if its worth it. But that is not part of the design for Autonomi.
Yes we are yet to see if Autonomi will be adopted or not, but “forever” data is not going to be the thing that decides if it dies and in fact may be a significant attractive forces to have people use it.
Also back to the burst issue. That is a more static view where the only people using it will be the ones who are using it now. If Autonomi is adopted (required for anything to survive in internet world) then new people will be using it all the time, so for each person there will be a burst then steady increase after their drop. And that will be happening over the course of years for all the new people doing it. By then all the early ones are uploading much more (images for instance, see above) than what they did 3 years ago.
Your model of what will happen does not account that the users are not static in data production nor the number of users.