Heat. A lot of components - and not just in computers but everything hardware - are spec'd for something called "duty cycles", basically how long a thing is act

Heat. A lot of components - and not just in computers but everything hardware - are spec'd for something called "duty cycles", basically how long a thing is active in a specific time frame. Gaming cards/rigs, which many of the early miners were based on, rarely run at 100% all the time, the workload is burst-y (and distributed amongst different areas of the system). In comparison, a miner runs at 100% all the time. On top of that, for silicon there is an effect called electromigration [1], where the literal movement of electrons erodes the material over time - made worse by ever shrinking feature sizes as well as, again, the chips being used in exactly the same way all the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration