Dropbox hits back at storage-hungry crypto miners

Dropbox has moved its unlimited storage plan to a metered one in order to stop crypto miners’ “uneven usage”.

According to online digital storage giant Dropbox, its Dropbox Advanced plan was designed for businesses that would not have to worry about scaling up their storage as they grew. Dropbox also recognised that there would be a certain amount of uneven usage as some businesses ramped up more than others.

However, it was not prepared for storage space hoggers such as crypto and Chia mining, individuals pooling storage for their own personal use, and even some customers selling on their storage to others.

A post on the Dropbox blog explained how the company was planning to react:

“While we prohibit abusive behavior, maintaining long lists of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” use cases for Advanced would not be a sustainable solution, and these kinds of policies would be difficult to enforce at scale. As a result, we’re sunsetting the “as much space as you need” policy and transitioning to a metered model. That said, we’re committed to making this transition as seamless as possible for our customers.”

The company went on to say that although their “as much space as you need” model would no longer be operating, the new Dropbox Advanced plan would grant customers with three active licences a storage of 15 TB, which it said would be enough to store 100 million documents, 4 million photos, or 7500 hours of HD video.

For those who were using the storage for mining crypto and other exploitative activities they will need to find alternatives or close down their ventures. This kind of action was sometimes using thousands of times more storage than was the case with genuine business customers.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.