Thanks to crypto miners, Dropbox says ‘no more’ to unlimited storage

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Dropbox has decided to put a cap on its “all-you-can-store” buffet on storage. Why the sudden change of heart, you ask? Well, it seems some users have been playing a bit fast and loose with the term “unlimited.”

The original idea behind Dropbox’s unlimited storage was to cater to businesses operating in shared spaces. But, as it turns out, a few crafty crypto miners decided to bend the rules for personal gain or even reselling the storage.

One of the main culprits is a unique cryptocurrency called Chia.

Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, which use proof of work or proof of stake models, Chia has a different approach. It’s all about “proof of space and time.” This allows users to earn crypto rewards based on “plots” of 100 GB storage space.

It’s clever, but it’s causing some headaches.

Some users have taken to staking these plots on cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, causing a significant uptick in storage usage.

Dropbox eventually caught on, with users consuming way more storage than your average business customer, which could potentially compromise the service’s reliability.

“In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of this behavior in the wake of other services making similar policy changes,” Dropbox said. “We’ve observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers.”

So, Dropbox has decided to switch gears. They’re moving from an unlimited plan to a more controlled model. Here’s a quick breakdown of the changes to Dropbox’s storage plans.

New policy, new DropBox

The new Dropbox Advanced plan will offer 15 TB of storage, shared equally among three licenses, for $30 per user per month.

Current Dropbox Advanced subscribers can keep their storage levels for the next five years as long as they’re below 35 TB.

In the end, Dropbox is just the latest in a line of cloud storage providers to limit their offerings. And all it took was a group of crypto nerds to ruin it for everyone.

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Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com or find him on Mastodon or Post.