Bitcoin Forum

What are some of the most practical uses of an asic unit built for mining bitcoins according to you guys?
I mean apart from using it as a heater or paperweight.

I get it, it's application specific but is there really no way to repurpose it?

Some of the more wild ideas would be for it to be 'upgradeable' with some plug in hardware that can turn it into an external 'graphic card' or 'processor'?

Any previous discussions on this particular topic here? (I am sure there are many) 


Asked this on the marketplace by mistake, had many tabs opened.

Yes there are many topics already about this.

There are 4 known alternative uses for bitcoin ASICs depending on size and weight:
Paper weight
Book end
Door stop
Boat anchor

Lol I already said, apart from those.

I gave you 3 more options, but otherwise, no. You said it yourself, they're application specific and completely useless for anything else.

The little USB miners can be turned into hardware PRNGs for a Raspberry Pi or similar.

Create the world's most useless rainbow table? Crack passwords of whatever website still uses Sha256 to hash their passwords, and in an oddly specific turn of events uses double round at that? (disclaimer: I'm not sure if Bitcoin ASICs actually do double rounds on the hardware level, maybe you could use it for other obsolete insecure databases as well).

Sha256^2 hashing is hardly used outside of cryptocurrency mining and unfortunately that's all those chips (by their very definition) are able to do.

You could still use it as conversation piece on your coffee table? Or as the world's slowest toaster?

See they don't even do that. They don't complete the double sha and don't return the hash at the end, only nonces that meet targets. So they really are useless.

Aw shucks. You just crushed my dream of creating a sha256 rainbow table ICO using repurposed mining hardware! I was just about to finish the whitepaper! :-[

Seriously though, that's quite interesting. I always assumed that the ASICs were basically the sha256 algorithm cast in silicon, with most of the mining logic taking place on the software layer. Today I learned.

If you did a bit of coding could you get it to return the hash? Or do any other applications operate in a similar way to Bitcoin mining? I feel that they should be able to computer at least something else.

Make a mace, to bludgeon those who keep asking what else you can do with these besides their specific application...  ::)

If those chips don't return the hash, then code won't help you, because the logic is already set in stone silicon. If they only return nonces, than that's all they'll ever do.