What would be the technical, and wider, implications of a cryptocurrency that used proof-of-disk-space? ShelbyMooreIII is promoting AnonyMint and/or AnonyCash as a concept* cryptocurrency based on a disk-space intensive algorithm. Some details are given here: http://anonymint.org/#Proof-of-Work_Designs

What would be the positive or negative impact of this kind of software on:


The disk you're running it on
The CPU/GPU of the PC
The HDD market
The environmental effects of increased disk manufacture (I'm assuming here that such a currency would cause an increase in production)
Anything else substantially affected


*I don't know what stage of development AnonyMint is at.
I'm speculating here, because I'm not going to test anything out.


The IOPS would like shoot through the roof. The potentially large amount of writes and reads will likely affect disk life, especially if the disk is an SSD. It would generate excess heat. A magnetic disk would also generate constant vibration. Heat can be controlled easier than GPU or CPU heat because there's less of it, and vibration can be dampened using rubber mounts. The largest risk is simply drive failure due to above average activity.
The GPU would likely be idle. The CPU would only be necessary to drive the hardware operations.
I think it may be difficult to get a 3 TB drive for that new gaming rig, because all of the miners would be trying to pack as much disk space into a device as possible. 
I don't know enough about the manufacturing process to hypothesize accurately. 
I could see a lot of need for drive recycling. HDDs burn out a lot quicker and take up a lot more waste weight than CPUs and GPUs.


What's interesting about the proof-of-storage-space concept is that it can really take advantage of unused space on consumer devices. I know I've got a 500 GB hard drive in my work computer that has never seen more than 50 GB on it. Amalgamate that across a corporate network, and there's probably PB of space available! I could see malicious types taking advantage of this in malware pretty easily, too: high CPU or GPU usage causes lots of heat and terrible performance, while high HDD usage can just make a program take a few seconds longer to start up.