Dropbox, a file hosting services company based in San Francisco, California, has announced that it will stop offering unlimited storage to its users after it found multiple instances of people using the offering for resource-exhaustive processes like cryptocurrency mining. The mining of digital assets like Bitcoin has attracted the attention of conglomerates and regulators for its increased energy requirements and effects on the environment
In a blog post on August 24, Dropbox confirmed the news, stating that it is moving to a metered storage policy on its “Advanced Plan.” Furthermore, the American firm confirmed that the vast majority of its customers need not take any action and will be able to keep their existing storage and more for up to five years at no additional charge.
Dropbox added that it had introduced the Advanced Plan, offering businesses unlimited access to data storage under its “as much space as you need” policy. The plan offered customers access to as much storage as they needed, “along with sophisticated admin, audit, security, and integration capabilities,” said the firm, while adding:
“Over time, we found a growing number of customers were buying Advanced subscriptions not to run a business or organization, but instead for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage.”
Dropbox confirmed that crypto and China miners consume thousands of times more storage than its regular customers while noting that under its Advanced Plan, it sought to provide “as much storage as needed to run a legitimate business or organization, not to provide unlimited storage for any use case.”
The firm noted that it would be difficult to introduce a list of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” use cases for its Advanced Plan and that it would be a daunting task to enforce them at scale. Therefore, it has decided to sunset the “as much space as you need” policy and is now transitioning to a metered model.
Moreover, Dropbox confirmed that starting August 24, the new Advanced Plan with three active licenses will allow customers to receive 15TB of storage space shared by the team. Moreover, each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage
“Customers using less than 35TB of storage per license—over 99% of Advanced customers—will be able to keep the total amount of storage their team is using at the time they’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage, for five years at no additional charge to their existing plan,” said Dropbox
As reported earlier by Bitnation, lawmakers in the United States have considered putting a ban on cryptocurrency mining, which could take a toll on the digital asset sector
