chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing is shifting opex (electricity consumption) to capex (hardware costs). We can see this in bitcoin mining hardware. They've gotten exponentially more efficient over the years, but electricity consumption hasn't gone down. Having lower opex only incentivizes miners to pour more money into hardware, which results in resources poured into manufacturing rather than providing electricity.