Hey kids, did you know there are cryptocurrency schemes now which give you coins in exchange for renting out your device’s empty storage space in a distributed network?
(keep reading, it gets goooood)

This means you can monetize storage space if you have enough of it... or if you can come up with a better compression technique... and I suppose a fast enough network connection to serve the encrypted storage network it runs through...

But nobody has unlimited storage space and it would take a big corporation to have an increasingly speedy network of geographically optimal nodes to serve from. I guess that’s probably a busted idea from a profitability perspective ...

...or not?
I suppose if someone had millions of bot personas on social media platforms, they could probably leverage non-stealthy steganography-ish techniques tuned for compression to store data within 1-to-1 social messages sent in “conversations” between the fake accounts.

Have you ever been limited n the number of rapid fire cat pictures you could send over a social network “private chat” to your grandmother?
Ever been worried about reaching the limit on selfies you can upload to your wall? (probably not)

Pictures are just data. If you have millions of bot accounts, you have access to unlimited, free data storage... if you realize it.

The “botmaster” in this scenario is not having to spend any resources on storage, maintenance, caching nodes, research, or network upgrades.

Because the social media platform company is paying for all of that.

And if successful enough, the unscrupulous controller of some seemingly nonsensical chitter-chatter army might even have such a grand storage capacity scheme worked out that the social media platforms unknowingly begin renting some of that storage capacity for their own use.

This would create a real pickle of a quagmire though if ever found out by the social media platforms... their immediate natural reaction would be to purge it all if made aware of the nesting-doll-ish layered storage grift.

But could they?

The problem with overlooking or tolerating small, clearly scalable, self-propagating schemes is that they will one day outgrow your ability to contain them. If you have come to rely on a byproduct of the not-so-good pattern... destroying it might mean destroying yourself too.

So don’t be a dipsh.t about it to start with. Thanks!