They are Asics, which means the sha256 hashing algo is baked in to the hardware, it can't run any algo but that. This algo is not very memory intensive, any memory needed is baked directly in the hardware. So no, there is no ram. You can't do anything with these but hash sha256.
Because dumb people who just read their first introductory 3 paragraphs about mining and getting rich will go to Amazon and buy one for $450 without a second thought in their brain. They will learn to check a profit calculator about 3 hours later and start panicking about how to return it. They will sell it for $30 on Facebook marketplace.
Bitcoin mining uses "Application Specific Integrated Circuits". They are designed to be VERY good at one thing, and one thing only. They are shit for general computing tasks of any kind.
Coins using RandomX or similar (AKA ASIC-resistant) algorithms can have their rigs repurposed (because the whole point is that general purpose computing equipment isn't outperformed by useless ASICs
your lack of curiosity is astounding, theres no such thing as never and the best discoveries are made from the impossilbe.
Could we repurpose a Bitcoin ASIC miner to perform useful AI calculations, even though it was never designed for them?
My answer is theoretically yes, under certain conditions, but we'd have to approach it very differently from a conventional GPU.
The trick would be finding useful AI computations that resemble what the miner already does, rather than trying to make its chips behave like NVIDIA GPUs.
Five theoretical approaches
1. Use Bitcoin hashing as an AI computation primitive
Bitcoin ASIC chips are extraordinarily good at SHA-256 hashing.
What if we designed an AI system that uses hashing as part of its computation?
For example:
Hash-based neural networks.
Binary feature extraction.
High-speed lookup and matching.
Hash-based approximate nearest-neighbour search.
Privacy-preserving fingerprint comparisons.
We could potentially offload portions of an AI system's workload to the ASIC.
The limitation: SHA-256 is designed to destroy useful numerical relationships between inputs. It doesn't naturally support neural-network mathematics. We'd need an algorithm specifically designed around hashing.
2. Build an AI system around binary operations
Conventional neural network
Matrix multiplication
Floating-point calculations
Model output
Hypothetical ASIC-compatible system
Binary-encoded inputs
Hash-based feature processing
CPU/GPU inference and interpretation
Binary neural networks use operations such as XOR, bit counts and accumulation.
A Bitcoin ASIC uses some related low-level logic, but its XOR gates and adders are hardwired into SHA-256 circuits. We can't generally access those individual gates as programmable operations.
However, if we could discover a way to encode useful binary-network computations into the ASIC's supported hashing interface, there might be a niche application. That's speculative, not an established method.
3. Use ASICs for AI search or optimization
This is the approach I'd investigate first.
Some AI-related problems involve searching millions of possibilities:
Finding staffing schedules that satisfy constraints.
Exploring different optimization candidates.
Searching for particular hash-defined solutions.
Testing candidate configurations against compact fingerprints.
Imagine using an ASIC to process a specialized part of a scheduling optimizer.
The challenge is that Bitcoin mining hardware only evaluates a very narrow mathematical search problem. We would need to transform some useful part of our optimization problem into one it can evaluate without losing the original constraints.
In most cases, that transformation is likely to cost more than it saves.
4. Exploit the miner's surrounding hardware
A Bitcoin miner contains more than hashing chips.
7
Depending on the model, it may include an embedded Linux controller, networking, cooling hardware and a substantial power supply.
We could potentially repurpose these components for a local AI appliance, with a separate GPU or AI accelerator doing the actual inference.
That's more practical, although the controller itself usually has modest computing capabilities.
5. Design a new AI architecture inspired by mining ASICs
This is the most ambitious possibility.
Instead of converting an existing miner, imagine building an AI accelerator using the same principles:
Thousands of simple parallel processing elements.
Minimal instruction overhead.
Low-precision arithmetic.
Highly specialized inference operations.
Very high throughput for a narrow task.
That is a promising general hardware philosophy. But it would require new silicon or programmable hardware, not simply a firmware update to an Antminer.
My recommended experiment
I'd start with a used SHA-256 ASIC miner and investigate its control interface rather than physically modifying its chips.
The experiment would have three stages:
Understand the hashing engine: Determine exactly which input fields we control and what outputs the ASIC exposes.
Develop a computational mapping: Search for an AI-adjacent algorithm where SHA-256 evaluations perform genuinely useful work.
Benchmark the complete system: Compare accuracy, throughput, electricity consumption and cost against your RTX 5070.
The key test is whether the ASIC is doing something useful that a conventional CPU or GPU cannot do more efficiently.
The bigger question
There are two very different inventions we could pursue:
A. Make an existing $100–$300 used Bitcoin ASIC perform some useful AI computation. Very challenging, but potentially an interesting research experiment.
B. Create a new AI processing architecture inspired by Bitcoin mining hardware. More technically ambitious, but with much greater freedom to design the mathematics and circuitry.
My recommendation is A first. If we can discover one genuinely useful AI operation that maps efficiently onto SHA-256 hardware, we'd have something worth investigating further.
I wouldn't promise that it can run a language model like Qwen, but we could absolutely investigate whether it can accelerate a narrower part of an AI pipeline.
Kinda my point. is there a retrofit possible? sure they are currently setup a bitcoin miners but they still have alot of useable parts. (power, heatsincks, housing, connectors ect. Maybe a simple board swap loaded with ram and a optimized cpu for AI?
You just forgot to mention the last paragraph of that post lmao
"Failed" there means that it's no longer profitable... If whoever used that has Run it for years profitable he is probably rich right now and just didn't bother to update to new ASICS.
Incorrect. He literally said they went bankrupt. Bankruptcy means they have no money left to pay their bills, which means they've been LOSING money for a long time. That's the opposite of profitability.
The fact that you and the guy you replied to have dozens of upvotes really highlights how financially illiterate this sub is.
First, financial iliteracy is not knowing that you can claim bankruptcy eventhough you have money (even a lot of it). Your corrupt politicians and their friends would love to meet you when they default their debt without consequences and you will have to pay it through taxes.
Second, the underlying post OP seems to be mistaking unprofitability = bankruptcy from they way he wrote his post.
Third, the underlying post OP even admits he is using the term failed loosly since they mined a lot.
Do you think the land owner who rented them the space would be liquidating what is supposedly their equipment for scrap value if they "had a lot of money"? That doesn't require financial literacy, that's just basic literacy.
You dont stay rich by spending money you dont have to. Leaving a buisness bankrupt is usually the most profitable outcome. You can not pay your bills for months, give your self a big personal bonus check and then declare your bankruptcy as you walk out with 3 months of operating expenses in your pocket. And its all kosher cause you don't owe your landlord and the electric company, the buisness does, but that buisness is bankrupt.
You and the land owner are probably under the impression that you know how Crypto Farms and loopholes work...
The landowner is the father of the friend of the OP and he let the Crypto Farm leave the obsolete S19s eventhough he will have to pay for the disposel and might not even break even with the scrap... And worst of all he let the Farm take the rest of the equipment which are probably better ASICS.
The Crypto Farms don't declare everything they make so that way they pay less taxes and they also mine to private wallets só investigating that is a nightmare.
They probably declared bankruptcy to default the last payments, leave the obsolete S19s for the landowner foot the bill of disposable, took the better ASICS and now either they Open a new Company with a clean slate elsewhere on their friend, wife, mistress name and continue their shit or simply sell the better ASICS for a profit and cashout their hidden crypto to call it quits.
If even the big mines are going bankrupt that means there is pretty much no hope for an average person to mine. I mean I know realistically that's been the case for a long time, but it does kind of make me sad for the sake of Bitcoin as a currency that it's becoming so centralized
"Failed" there means that it's no longer profitable... If whoever used that has Run it for years profitable he is probably rich right now and just didn't bother to update to new ASICS.
That's false. Businesses don't just go bankrupt the first time they have an unprofitable quarter. When a business goes bankrupt it means they've been unprofitable and losing money for a long time.
This is the Crypto scene... they can claim bankruptcy whenever since their assets are in a Private Wallet and could default debt if they wish, still the OP of the underlying post seems to be mistaking unprofitability with bankruptcy since he claimed at the end they mined millions.
still the OP of the underlying post seems to be mistaking unprofitability with bankruptcy since he claimed at the end they mined millions.
Unprofitability precedes bankruptcy, and he only mentioned revenue, not cost. They could've mined "million" but still lost money for every Bitcoin they mined.
The owner himself might be rich because he paid himself out. And maybe that's why the business was unprofitable. Either way, that would still make the business an unprofitable failure.
No... that doesn't make the business an unprofitable failure, by your logic the business was profitable but got siphoned by the owner... You can interpret the word failure however you want.
A Crypto farm like that, that was Run for years until now with S19s, statiscally as a whole has to be profitable. The owner simply cashed out and went on his way, if he bankrupt it or not, he made a lot of money even if he spent it all in hookers and red wine.
that doesn't make the business an unprofitable failure, by your logic the business was profitable but got siphoned by the owner...
"My business went bankrupt because I took too much money out of it for it to run for more than a couple of years" does make the business an unprofitable failure. I don't know how you justify that it wasn't.
A Crypto farm like that, that was Run for years until now with S19s, statiscally as a whole has to be profitablef
No, it doesn't. A business can run multiple years breaking even or with a loss.
To be fair, is there any mining right now that's actually profitable? The last time I looked into mining was probably 5 years ago, but I remember that the math just really didn't work out. I imagine it's worse now
Only way they are rich right now is if they sold on the highs which they probably couldn't afford to do to continue running the op smoothly and paying for expenses every month
I had a buddy one time a few years ago tell me to invest in his bitcoin mining operation in his garage in New Jersey.
I told him it was stupid.
I have a physics and math degree. There's no way you can profitably mine bitcoin at the scale of indie garage hacker. The cost of electricity needed to run the system and cool it is too high unless you have economies of scale with data center level rigs, or you live in a place with extremely subsidized energy costs.
There's way too many people that don't understand the second law of thermo.
Yup, I did eth mining back in like 2017-2018, I think I mined maybe 4 or 5 ETH, it did cover electriity costs, but I would have made way more money buying ETH instead of 18 GPUs.
It would have been more profitable to just buy eth on the low, but on the peaks i recovered GPU costs in 2,5 months..energy prices are(was) low in country though. Epic times
Unless you don't consider the heat a loss. Know a guy that ran a small mining setup inside his house as central heater. Mostly solar powered too. The mining itself was not profitable. about elek cost vs profit 1/1.
Getting half the energy from solar pushed it to slighty profitable.
But he had free heating ! that was saving some money.
I spend electricity in the winter to heat my home. If the heating unit also mined bitcoin it would be free money. The waste heat is good in this application. The main thing preventing this is the cost of mining hardware and installation. Scavenging compute heat in the winter months just doesn't make sense from an equipment standpoint, but if the hardware were free it could make sense.
Yeah so this is what I mean as people say these words and don't understand physics. I'm sorry, but this is slightly wrong. To be competitive at mining bitcoin, you need way more servers. Your likelihood of winning a block would not be worth running this system in the winter.
The economies of scale are the issue. You need thousands of "heaters" and your house would be 300 degrees, then at that point, you need a heat sink. That's where the economies of scale matter because you can get better efficiency with larger heat sinks like mining in Greenland.
Pools aren't bad, they're just not efficient. Spreading out mining across different energy costs and different cooling doesn't really mean it's cost effective. You can have a pool with a ton of inefficient rigs and it will lose money for everyone.
In any case all this is silly to me as an Ethereum guy. Proof of stake kinda solves this. I think my point is Proof of work is insanely competitive now.
There's nuance to insurance. Insurance can be bad if your pool of risk is high, which is why either your premiums are high or your payout is capped.
For mining the premium of buying and maintaining the heat and equipment is high. If the pool cant generate enough hashrate it won't be a high enough payout.
If you get the hardware for free, the hardware cost is zero!
Mining bitcoin does not cool your house down, it heats it up. The way that heat works, is when you put a certain amount of watts through the hardware, it gets converted into heat (and noise, but mostly heat).
Bitcoin mining hardware is not less efficient in converting electricity to heat compared to just a resistive heating element. It is the same efficiency. It just costs more for the hardware. So if you were to crawl inside your HVAC and replace the heating element with bitcoin mining hardware, it doesn't matter if it is not "cost efficent" in your opinion to run as a business. It is free heat. You need the heat anyways. The heat is free. The hardware is free.
So if you join a pool, you get some free satoshis. If you never mine a block, with free hardware and electricity you would pay for anyways (remember, you are converting it to heat), then the additional marginal cost is... zero. It still doesn't lose money.
The reason nobody does this is the hardware is not free.
Actually a heat pump has a coefficient of power of up to 6, which means that a joule of electricity can heat the inside of your house by 6 joules. So again, you do not understand thermodynamics and hence do not get why this is hella expensive.
Also business. Guy's think bitcoin mining hardware is "just free" and no one smarter or richer than him would have bought it in bulk.
Green frog in the forest theory. If you are in a rainforest and you're hungry, and you see the neon green frogs visible from space: A. Wonder why no other animal ate that frog. B. If you eat that frog, it will be your last meal.
My heat pump cost about a fifth of the cost of its yearly electricity consumption. It has an average CoP of about 4, so if I instead use a bitcoin miner with a CoP of 1 it would only take 2 years to have the heat pump pay for itself. In the first year of the btc-miner-as-heat-pump I would pay an extra 60% of the cost of the heat pump in electricity. The bitcoin miner has to be quite efficient (at converting energy into btc) for this to work out, and such a miner is not at all free. If you use outdated hardware it will never carry its cost if you need to consume 4 times the amount of energy to heat your home. So the premise of the thread I am replying to is simply wrong. What is your point?
A heat pump is 4x more efficient than a Bitcoin miner at heating a space. Any money you "generate" mining is dwarfed by the amount of money you'd save by just using a heat pump.
Dont know about bitcoin but i made lots of money in altcoins with gpus. More than doubled after all expenses taken into account. Eletricity costed around 10 cents per killowatt at the time.
Greetings Personal-Shirt3650. Your comment contained a link to telegram, which is hard blocked by reddit. This also prevents moderators from approving your comment, so please repost your comment without the telegram link.
I built a rig and mined the first few years into eth. Made a few thousand dollars before it wasnt profitable anymore. Def worked in the very beginning.
The e-waste from mining is real. I have a dozen random miners I don’t know what to do with. A few Kadena and even brand new helium that I got screwed on cause they took so long to deliver by the time they arrived the bull run was over 😩
I haven't seen any estimates of how much $$ was probably lost, but it looks like it would be very hard to judge. If it happens, can someone Pin the cost post please?
Coming from experience it looks like what happened was the supplier sent the units somewhat unfinished. With about 100-200k worth of equipment in 2010 We could mine 30 BTC a month for around a year before the has rate caught up.
265
u/MyStackOverflowed 🟩 63 / 64 🦐 17h ago
do these have ram