> If the network lose 90% of capacity over a month, you'll hear about grim the future for FIL is, on every crypto newsletter. And the price would tank even more.

But the supply of storage goes down, which the storage buyers now need to outbid each other for, so they need to buy the coin. I'm assuming it's also possible for the price of storage in FIL to go down as the price moves. If $1 US is 100 FIL but now providing 1TB/year of storage yields hundreds of FIL, you still earn several dollars US per TB stored.

> How can they link me to my previous identity though… I'd just discard the previous wallet after having drained the available funds and restart from a clean state.

No reputation is the same as bad reputation. To have a good reputation you have to engage in a large number of transactions which are less profitable to you because they're undergoing 100% verification. Building a good reputation allows you to make higher margins, which is valuable and therefore costly to sacrifice.

You can't transfer funds you've staked against your reputation until the buyer has had a reasonable amount of time to try to prove you defected.

> The stacking must end at some point, and given that I can do damage with only a fraction percent adversarial computation, I can just make sure that my probability to get caught during the stacking time isn't enough for it to get a negative expected value.

Suppose you have a good reputation so you only undergo verification 10% of the time at random instead of 100% of the time. You also have to hold 20 times your revenue from this transaction as collateral during the verification window, or however much is necessary to more than compensate the buyer and punish you in the event that you defected.

Now if you defect you have a 10% chance of losing 2000% of your payment. This has a negative expected value. Meanwhile it's now public that you defected and every other buyer still in the verification window is going to go back and verify 100% of their transactions with you, causing you to have a 100% chance of losing 2000% of your payment for those transactions if you defected.

> You'll need to send roughly a thousand of them, without getting bad reputation from all the disks that will break soon after the buyer receives it (because on that amount, and given the state of the disks, a lots will).

The annual failure rate for ~6 year old hard drives is ~2%. Presumably the failure rate over six months is about half that, and you have plenty of other functional drives to send replacements to satisfy the ~1% of customers who got unlucky.

> Also, you're not really disagreeing with my assessment, 6 month is pretty illiquid by investment standard: it's even less liquid than real estate!

That's only because you're trying to sell 10PB of hard drives. It's like saying shares of stock are illiquid because if you want to sell ten billion dollars of shares in the same company it might not be advisable to do it all on the same day.

And even that you could still do, if you want to solicit a large buyer, which in this context would presumably be some kind of data center.

But even supposing that it would take six months, what's your reasoning for why it has already persisted for longer than that period of time then?