So PM claims it has on the order of 10^8 users. Let’s assume each user has one email address with one public ed25519 key, both of which are likely false.
Each key is 32Byte; 32B * 10^8 = 3.2GB.
Could someone do the math how much fiat it’d take to store such an enormous amount of data on the Ethereum or monero blockchains?
Voting is another concept that would become unhackable overnight
No. Voting on the blockchain is an even worse idea than money on the blockchain.
In many cases, there are good reasons why these things are done they way they are. I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
A single actor might be able to commit voter fraud in the order of dozes or hundreds of votes perhaps but with a digital voting system based on blockchain, they could do so on the order of thousands or even millions by compromising end-user devices used for voting or buy enough work/stake/whatever to perform a 51% attack.
Same goes for money btw. Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
The “cache” on HDDs is extremely tiny. Maybe a few seconds worth of sequential access at max. It does not exist to cache significant amounts of data for much longer than that.
At the sizes at which bcache is used, you could permanently hold almost all of your performance-critical data on flash storage while having enough space for tonnes of performance-uncritical data; all in the same storage “package”.
AMD platform support is coming to coreboot in the next few years, consumer platforms much later and even there I’m doubtful it’d come to your laptop in particular.
Get a Frame.work with Intel chip if you want coreboot on a modern laptop soon-ish. I know the guy working on that port ;)
It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved /home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such “bad” distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.
If you were installing “manually” and had full control over this, I’d advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.