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Comment by zoltrix303 | Hacker News Reader

I always thought that if bitcoin crashed, the mining centers could be refactored someway into other use for computing power alone.

Now with this new currency, you could maybe even run cloud storage. Maybe we are accidentally building the futur alternatives to Amazon cloud services.

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> the mining centers could be refactored someway into other use for computing power alone

The chips that are mining bitcoin are not general purpose computers.

But the hard disks are general purpose storage devices, right? Any chance they will become custom ASIC storage that can't be repurposed too?

You don't want any components that have been used in coin mining. Generally, GPUs, desktop CPUs, RAM, consumer disks (both solid stats and spinning rust) and even power supplies are not designed for years of 24x7 100% load.

This is a part of why NVidia cracked down on gpu mining recently - when ASIC mining became more profitable than GPUs, the secondhand market got flooded with cheap high quality cards (thus ruining the primary sale market for new GPUs) and people flooded NVidia support with support queries for slow or unreliable GPUs.

Chia doesn't require running disks at 24x7 100% load. You fill up your storage and then wait until you win the lottery. Most of the time, you won't win and your disk can remain idle.

Well, mostly idle. You can't win if you're not online, can you?

Drives used for Chia farming both SSD and HDD would have very little use over time. All the discussion around Chia destroying SSD's is when they are used in the initial plotting process which does a huge amount of reads and writes in the process of generating a plot. Once you move those plots to a large capacity spinning disk for farming, there is very little reads on the disk thereafter.

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