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Any use for old crypto mining gear?

Actual ASIC based miners are pretty much useless unless you have some specific application that benefits from ridonkulous SHA256 hash rates. So, I dunno, maybe cracking (specific types) of password crypts or VPN dumps, although you’d probably need to be the CIA to afford to power them.

Some older miners used FPGAs that could potentially be reused, but I think those had been getting unprofitable to run (like GPUs) even before the crypto crash.
 
… I mean, I guess in principle you could use them as space heaters; they turn watts into BTUs just fine while pumping out garbage numbers, the main drawback compared to most dedicated heating elements is they’ll fail at lower temperatures so your heat transfer mechanism needs to be more elaborate.
 
I have an AVALON1 here, if not as a specimen of the Bitcoin era. It was one of the first purpose-built ASICS to come on the market a decade ago.

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I find that those early days really had the same vibe as the days when supercomputers were racing eachother to be the fastest in the world and were subsequently bumped out of the #1 spot within months of being commissioned and relegated to scrap within a few years. I planned to put a clear acrylic case on the top and use it as a display piece because once people were investing serious money into silicon and designing entire massively parallel systems it is actually quite beautiful. There's 240 individual processing elements pictured above. In my own experience and in a VERY distant abstract manner the only computer I can compare that to is a Thinking Machine.
 
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