Bitcoin mining with old servers

[Jay Glaus]

I’ve been jumping on the old Bitcoin wagon lately, have a few ASICS for mining. But a thought popped into my head on the way home from a service call tonight.

I know a number of people have been getting rid of their series 1 equipment to upgrade to series 2. I’m wondering if you could mine with an old server what the hashrate would be. I can’t remember what CPU GDC put in their old box servers, if memory serves though Doremi used a quad core, which isn’t going to mine anywhere near what a Threadripper from today would, even though cpu mining really isn’t profitable.

But I wonder if you could make a dolphin board mine... or for instance I was working on a GDC SX-2001A tonight, I wonder if you could get the media block inside it to mine.

Probably not. And it’s probably stupid and not going to be anywhere near profitable. I’m literally just thinking out loud. And the more I type the more I think it is not going to be worth the effort...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Unless you get your energy for free, don't even think about it, as you'll be mining entirely on your CPU. Getting a cash-positive out of ASIC can already be challenging, depending on the price of your power and the going rate of bitcoin.

Also, the Dolphin board uses ASICs to implement real-time JPEG2000 decompression. I don't see any useful way to repurpose that board into anything that will do brute-force hashing, especially not, because nobody is going to give you any inside information about that board, that board is designed as a secure black-box on purpose.