4 ms·

hey super cool my dudes, I'm sure your department or community couldn't use a cool million from some university who wanted to research folding proteins, or any

hey super cool my dudes, I'm sure your department or community couldn't use a cool million from some university who wanted to research folding proteins, or any of a number of startups who had some machine learning needs… just the coolest, vroom vroom crunch

ars 5y ago
Bitcoin miners can't be used for anything else except cracking hashes. You could maybe save the power supply.
dna_polymerase 5y ago
Looks like ASICs. These are worthless for anything besides mining BTC. Another counterpoint to Bitcoin. Ethereum has protections in place (had, Eth 2.0 changes everything again) to prevent ASICs.
- enlyth 5y ago
  Protections in place which created a global shortage in GPU availability for machine learning and gaming, sounds like they didn't work great
- freeone3000 5y ago
  The countermeasures are "uses more RAM than is convenient". The ASIC counter-countermeasure was to add more RAM. The countermeasure was effective for 18 months.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    So they steamrolled a bunch of cases, power supplies, and RAM? Kind of ironic.
    - freeone3000 5y ago
      Not PC cases and not PC power supplies, and probably not PC RAM. ASIC-based miners are built like embedded systems. None of these parts could be reused for general purpose computation.
      - rasz 5y ago
        You can see PC power supplies in the video.
        freeone3000 5y ago
        You can see power supplies.
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    Monero has more extensive ASIC-countermeasures in place: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX https://github.com/tevador/RandomX
    - noxer 5y ago
      And FBA consensus "coins" don't need countermeasures because they dont need any kind of proof of waste lottery to make progress.
      - boring_twenties 5y ago
        And neither does Paypal, et al. Why wouldn't I just use that if I don't care about decentralization?
        noxer 5y ago
        FBA is BFT + decentralization. The F stands for "Federated" in contrast to "just" distributed system which are only physically decentral, federated system also decentralize the control. The key difference is that it does not need a puzzle (and therefore no resource wasting to solve it) to determine who will write the next block but rather BFT is used to agree on the next block. Its quite elegant compared to the puzzle and obviously way more efficient.
version_five 5y ago
I has a similar initial reaction but my guess is it's not really feasible to repurpose these. I think (my knowledge is out of date) that dedicated miners are basically just asics designed to compute hashes really fast (presumably optimized for bitcoin blocks and cycling through a nonce). Unless another useful application is really close to that, you probably can't use them for it.
- dmos62 5y ago
  I'd wager that the idea was to have a PR stunt. Common good, etc., not really a priority here.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  Oops. Okay I’m dumb.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
The AS in ASIC is “application specific” - unless you’re researching how many kilowatt hours it takes to find a hash with 17 leading zeros, the machines serve little purpose.

ars 5y ago

Bitcoin miners can't be used for anything else except cracking hashes. You could maybe save the power supply.

dna_polymerase 5y ago

Looks like ASICs. These are worthless for anything besides mining BTC. Another counterpoint to Bitcoin. Ethereum has protections in place (had, Eth 2.0 changes everything again) to prevent ASICs.

enlyth 5y ago
Protections in place which created a global shortage in GPU availability for machine learning and gaming, sounds like they didn't work great
freeone3000 5y ago
The countermeasures are "uses more RAM than is convenient". The ASIC counter-countermeasure was to add more RAM. The countermeasure was effective for 18 months.
- gfodor 5y ago
  So they steamrolled a bunch of cases, power supplies, and RAM? Kind of ironic.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    Not PC cases and not PC power supplies, and probably not PC RAM. ASIC-based miners are built like embedded systems. None of these parts could be reused for general purpose computation.
    - rasz 5y ago
      You can see PC power supplies in the video.
      - freeone3000 5y ago
        You can see power supplies.
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Monero has more extensive ASIC-countermeasures in place: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX https://github.com/tevador/RandomX
  - noxer 5y ago
    And FBA consensus "coins" don't need countermeasures because they dont need any kind of proof of waste lottery to make progress.
    - boring_twenties 5y ago
      And neither does Paypal, et al. Why wouldn't I just use that if I don't care about decentralization?
      - noxer 5y ago
        FBA is BFT + decentralization. The F stands for "Federated" in contrast to "just" distributed system which are only physically decentral, federated system also decentralize the control. The key difference is that it does not need a puzzle (and therefore no resource wasting to solve it) to determine who will write the next block but rather BFT is used to agree on the next block. Its quite elegant compared to the puzzle and obviously way more efficient.

version_five 5y ago

I has a similar initial reaction but my guess is it's not really feasible to repurpose these. I think (my knowledge is out of date) that dedicated miners are basically just asics designed to compute hashes really fast (presumably optimized for bitcoin blocks and cycling through a nonce). Unless another useful application is really close to that, you probably can't use them for it.

dmos62 5y ago
I'd wager that the idea was to have a PR stunt. Common good, etc., not really a priority here.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
Oops. Okay I’m dumb.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

The AS in ASIC is “application specific” - unless you’re researching how many kilowatt hours it takes to find a hash with 17 leading zeros, the machines serve little purpose.