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Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

Can't say i'm happy about perfectly functional hardware just being destroyed.

There is a game theory argument that the police cannot be allowed to sell these, or it would incentivize them suddenly find lots of "illegal pc's" as a means of increasing their budget. But surely there must be a better solution than steamrolling them?

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They're ASICs, they're worthless for anything except mining certain kinds of crypto, given current prices not only would reselling them be questionable from a pragmatic perspective but it would be essentially encouraging the kind of illegal activity (i.e. electricity theft) which caused them to be confiscated in the first place.

Wonder if you could repurpose them to crack password hashes? (though even if so they'd still be better off steamrollered)

Presumably the power supplies could be repurposed?

Is destroying seized property the default thing to do there? If they siezed a perfectly working car, does that get crushed as well?

A car can be used for all kinds of legal activity, unlike an ASIC which relies on stolen electricity to be profitable.

>unlike an ASIC which relies on stolen electricity to be profitable.

Where are you getting this from? Are you saying the majority of bitcoin mining operations around the world operates on stolen electricity?

While I’m not sure how old these ones, older bitcoin ASICS are indeed only profitable on stolen power. If it produces 1c worth of magical internet money per kWh, then it has only illegal uses.

If you have solar power, you sometimes generate more electricity than you use. You can sell that power to the local power distributor, or store it in a battery. Both have efficiency loss issues (you may only get wholesale from the power company, and batteries wear out). Or you can use that excess power to generate cryptocurrency, and use that to buy more power from the utility provider when you need.

Yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM_SE5O28pM

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