You can't rebuild the image from the hash, but you can query various content-addressed stores for the image, potentially letting proof-of-space cryptocurrency systems do double duty as both verifiable resource commitments and repositories of blockchain external data.

Proof of wasted space. Proof of space algorithms just fill hard drives with garbage.

Better than continuously burning electricity, yes? And if the stored data is actually useful, is the net result all that bad?

I mean, it's still worse than not doing any of this lol, and that's the null hypothesis we should be using. Yes, getting stabbed is better than getting shot, but maybe stay inside and fire up a nice S3 bucket.

The real problem is any proof of resource scheme immediately becomes a grey goo where folks are incentivized to consume literally all that resource wether it makes sense or not. It has no negative feedback loop. It cannot make sense.

Also, because of market pricing of the tokens businesses cannot actually leverage it (as they don't want wacky prices that vary by the minute) so you're left with, as usual, illegal content, gambling, speculation and other misc crime. Basically why Filecoin has a small rack of hard drives' worth of stored data and Chia has exabytes and exabytes of garbage - or did, does anyone care about that one anymore?

It makes more sense to just store garbage if your goal is to run a neat little pyramid scheme.

If they store images instead then it's not garbage.

Reconstitute no. Get yes. A hash is much better than an average filename is much better than somesite/NFT_4556.jpg