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Comment by jxf | Hacker News Reader

They couldn't at least reuse them? Are mining rigs useful for purposes other than mining?

Bitcoin asics are basically just ewaste once they’re no longer useful or profitable. Since they’re designed for just Bitcoin there’s not really any other use. You can get older asics first cheap on the secondary market (although most sellers try to scam people not knowing previous generation miners are useless). Maybe useful if you want a unique way to heat a room?

Then I wish they'd recycled them instead of destroyed them.

An early step in recycling is usually shredding. It's better to remove big things made of known metals first (like copper wires and aluminum cases), but if they keep it all together it can still be processed.

has anyone ever actually calculated that? like what if we used old ASICs to heat our rooms, would they be more efficient than a heater after accounting for the small number of bitcoin you'd get?

Heat pumps are far more efficient than resistive heating, so this wouldn't be economical.

I'd imagine that will be too loud to be practical.

that's not a great way to think. One needs to think if something is possible before trying to solve unrelated issues that some engineering can probably figure out.

Also expensive way to heat a room, and loud

> expensive

Compared to heat pumps? Yes. But compared to resistive electric heating it's just as good (if not better, since you could theoretically recoup some of the burned energy as cryptocurrencies).

Most mining rigs have zero use for anything but mining.

A few mining systems are GPU's (used for mining certain types of crypto), and those can be resold for other uses, although typically after being used for a few years for mining they might be damaged and no longer usable for other uses.

I think you mean reuse, not recycle. The first step in most recycling processes is a shredder.

True enough; edited.

Depends. FPGA-based ones can be purposed for other things in principle, ASIC-based ones probably not, and afaik the latter is what's common for Bitcoin.

My understanding is that FPGAs have been unprofitable for Bitcoin since the first ASICs were taped out.

FPGAs are still profitable for other coins that are memory-limited. Bitcoin is just brute force compute.

> Are mining rigs useful for purposes other than mining?

Nope. Other than maybe the power supply they are single purpose devices - they crack hashes, that's it.

Might be good for computing rainbow tables perhaps? But not much use for sha256 hashes.

Maybe they could be used to study the distribution of SHA256 hashes, with an eye to uncovering vulnerabilities in the algorithm?

I'd be grateful for any insight into why this suggestion was downvoted. Is it a silly idea for some reason?

Maybe do some number crunching for science?

Malaysia: Crunching achieved!

They can not do number crunching. They only do bitcoin hashes.

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