ASIC Miner -> Foldng machine

[Charles Wirth]

Has anyone figured out how to convert old Antminers to DC folding yet? I know the older machines are no longer profitable.

[Serra]

I'm not sure it would be possible.

Antminers and similar hardware is built on specialty ASICs that are designed to do nothing but the same (relatively few) calculation steps over and over. In general, I would say that any WCG projects that could benefit from such a technically "simple" setup would need to be specially coded. With that said, with the abundance of Antminers being tossed to the curb these days, it might be an avenue worth exploring. Many loads probably couldn't be hacked that way, but some might - and hey, I'll take one discovery of a way to cure a cancer or destroy some other illness over nothing! If you know anyone technical over at the WCG project it might be worth doing a call to discuss the possibilities. If you go that route let me know, I'd be interested to lend some hours to the initiative.


I will say that I think some extra hardware hacking would probably be needed in terms of offloading some work to a computer. Even operations like just checking whether the number(s) are correct would probably overrun what the ASICs themselves could do, and so results would probably have to be fed out to a computer to validate. But, in the long term, if the ASICs could do the crunching labor I bet you could hook up a single computer to read results from multiple miners.