Mining a chest allows players to pick it up with all the items inside and carry it in their inventory. Also supports vehicles, tanks, and accumulators.
For some chests (encountered the bug with Steel chests in pyanodon, iron chests are fine), when you press q to pick a steel chest, you get the packed version. Which means that you both can't manually use q to place steel chests, and also ghosts you place won't be built by bots.