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When this lunacy ends and people are left with racks of useless miners, is there anything they can be repurposed for?
by geetee 13y ago
When this lunacy ends and people are left with racks of useless miners, is there anything they can be repurposed for?
- kiba 13y agoNope!
- brianbreslin 13y agowill they be able to repurpose them to mine other types of coins? like prime/lite coin? maybe turn them over to SETI @HOME style projects?
- calinet6 13y agoPaperweights for the wads of cash resulting from their former jobs...
- rnicholson 13y agoIf were talking about graphics card rigs, well I guess could attempt to re-sell them to gamers and the like to attempt to get some money back out of them (although, in the end probably still a loss unless you covered the purchase+power/cooling+maint costs in mining with them) ASIC BTC mining hardware, I don't think can be re-purposed.
- chx 13y agoASIC miners are, well, Application Specific Integrated Circuits -- they can't be used for anything else than their original purpose. However, I am not familiar with the original purpose -- Bitcoin mining means taking a random number, calculating the SHA256 hash twice and compare with another number. If the chips are just massively parallel SHA256 circuits then they can be reused for other SHA256 needs (if there's any on this scale...) but if their hardwired operations is the whole mining round as described then no they can't.
- nwh 13y agoThey're generally not usable for anything SHA256 related. The input they take is a string, and a range of nonces to attempt. The only data they return is a positive if a particular nonce gives a low enough value. There's nothing useful there except for hashcat-like operations.
- Karunamon 13y agoWhat's to say this "lunacy" will end? Seems to only have a bright future to me.
- choult 13y agoAs I understand it, there are only a finite number of Bitcoins. Hence there will be an end to mining.
- geetee 13y agoPeople will continue to mine to earn fees from processing transactions.
- eterm 13y agoI find it ironic that proponents of bitcoins tend to argue that: 1. Bitcoins will take off because it has tiny fees for wealth transfer. 2. Future mining to keep the blockchains up will be supported by transaction fees. If all this mining power has to be kept up as the 25 bitcoin bonus runs out then the transaction fees could well end up just as high as the current 2.9% + 0.3 seen everywhere.
- obi-nine 13y agoUnlikely unless large banking cartels take over this service (which is possible). In any case there is approximately a century to figure this out.
- jafaku 13y agoThe free market will decide on that, and it will be fair. Even if we end up with ~3% fees, it would be totally worth it knowing that your account can't be randomly frozen, or your funds stolen by whoever is in charge of the fake wars (eg: war on drugs).
- betterunix 13y ago
- qnr 13y agoWhy lunacy? You need a huge amount of computing power to make a distributed currency resilient against attacks by the likes of NSA, hostile foreign states, etc. And to answer your question, no, the chips cannot be repurposed for anything else.
- mikeash 13y agoThis is a good point that's easy to forget. Mining is not a zero-sum game, but rather increased mining activity increases the security of the network as a whole. Whether it's worth throwing all these resources into Bitcoin in the first place is another question, but at least it's not the case that nothing changes when everybody doubles their hashing power.
- gabemart 13y agoI'm curious if the development of ASICs generally increases or decreases the security of the network. It seems to me that the resilience of the network to attack doesn't depend on the total computing power of the network, but on the dollar cost of the total computing power of the network. If ASIC deployment increases the computing power of the network 10x, but the availability of ASICs reduces the cost per unit of computing power by 11x, I would think it makes the network as a whole less secure. In other words, the existence of ASICs increases the computing power of the network, but the existence of ASICs also makes it cheaper for an adversary to buy boatloads of targeted computing power to attack the network.
- mikeash 13y agoIt would depend on your supposed adversary. If you're defending against "random wealthy person wants to subvert the network" then I think you're right. You make it cheaper for them at the same time it's cheaper for you. Your defense is adding more people (or at least more money for legitimate mining), not technology. On the other hand, if you're defending against e.g. the NSA, then they already have the ability to make their own hardware like this, so you're not helping them any further.
- 13y ago
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThat is the trick, they are disposable (in theory). You use them to mine more than their net cost in bitcoins and then you throw them away, investing X$ in the miner getting out Y$ (where Y > X) $ in bitcoin. Return being (Y/X)/period I doubt the ASICs can be retargeted. Although the cabinets and power supplies etc could (in theory) so you could turn around and re-populate it with SHA1 ASICs or something and start passwords or something with the boxes (would need new boards and programming though)
- TylerE 13y agoBut that can't work. It just _can't_. While the cost of producing bitcoins < value of bitcoins, more people will mine. More miners = higher difficulty = lower reward for mining.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoExcept that it has, at least once that I know of, one a friend who build a 16 video card setup in a re-purposed NetApp filer box, cost them $4,500 to put together all told and they sold enough bitcoin on the first bubble to return a bit more than double that ($10K). That setup is too slow these days (and it ran for about 6 months, so figure the cost of 6 months of electricity at (basically 36kWH/day, which at 25c/kW added another $1638 to his cost, but his heating bills were lower :-) What happens though is that the goal posts move, and of course if you get yours late and the difficulty has increased after you get one and you're under performing, well you lose. A number of people on the various forums claim to have made money on their miner setups as well but the forums are not really verifiable sources. As far as I can tell it works when the market price for bitcoin greatly exceeds their cost to produce, and that seems to happen frequently.
- TylerE 13y agoYea, but they're making money BECAUSE THE PRICE OF BITCOINS ROSE. Not because they "created value". That would have made just as much, without all the hassle, just by buying bitcoins at the initial lower price. Think of it absolutist terms, denominated only in BTC. If you buy a bitcoin miner, today, for 50btc, what do you think your odds are for mining 50btc + enough extra to pay for electricity before the device either fails or is obsolete, or returns at such a low rate you might as well of stuck your money in municipal bonds?
- tocomment 13y agoThey can be used for other currencies. For example namecoin must be getting a huge boost from all the bitcoin mining. My mining pools just throws in namecoins for me. I guess they can check the same hash against both systems.
- tocomment 13y agoThey could also be used for other blockchain based technologies such as bitmessage, or future voting systems. (I think, correct me if I'm wrong)
- betterunix 13y agoAssuming that the hash function does not need to be changed for some reason, of course. That is part of the risk of using hardware crypto: a vulnerability in the cryptosystem is expensive to fix.
- sirsar 13y agoBitmessage isn't blockchain based. Bitmessage, at the moment, is entirely separate from Bitcoin. While in Bitcoin, every full node has a complete transaction history since the network's inception, Bitmessage nodes simply hold every message since 2.5 days ago.
- tocomment 13y agoIsn't the proof of work the same as bitcoin though? (I shouldn't have said blockchain, proof of work would be what the ASIC's are relevant to.)
- VMG 13y agoSpace heaters. Future mining rigs will just be that.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoHeh, I have been looking at that for heating already. Would be nice to have a bitcoin electric shower :)
- Groxx 13y agoExcept they keep getting more efficient in computing and less efficient in heating.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agoYeah I bet there are some surface mounted resistors you could desolder. Also, boat anchor?