back to article It's spade sellers who REALLY make a killing in a gold rush: It's OVER for graphics card mining

If you’ve been mining "low-price Bitcoin wannabe" Litecoins with a rig of graphics cards, now is the time to shuffle them off to eBay – unless you can find a better use for them. Chinese chip manufacturer Innosilicon is now selling its “A2 Terminator”, a 28nm ASIC for mining Litecoins. It follows on the heels of its A1 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This ridiculous altcoin fad paid for a nice 280X crossfire upgrade....but that's it for me, the whole thing is just too stupid!

  2. Gordon 10

    A market for the big boys?

    Surely there is a market for Nvidia or AMD to market something between a GPU and an ASIC? Possibly a FPGA tuned for Cryto currency algorithyms?

    There must be something out there that whilst not quite having the time to market and efficiency

    of an ASIC from a specialist vendor, is *just* general purpose enough to have some longer term lifespan?

    This is all off the top of my head of course - feel free to tell me where Im wrong....

  3. PyLETS
    Mushroom

    So why should the miner care

    If the mining is done on pwned hardware anyway ? The beneficiary doesn't pay for the electricity used to run pwned hardware. It's an externality.

    Given the amount of pwned hardware on the planet, it seems economically improbable that anyone paying for their own rigs will be competitive in this murky world against pwned botnet mining.

  4. Bartholomew
    Flame

    almost dead hardware

    Would you buy a high-end graphics card of Ebay for cheap, that has been running 24/7 for a year plus solid. Probably over clocked a hell of a lot as well. The paste between the GPU and the cooling fins would probably have been running at 85 °C must be flaking away at this stage. These cards will be at deaths door sooner rather than later.

    1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      Re: almost dead hardware

      If the price was right, sure.

      Also, thermal grease is easy to replace.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Heh

    Even better idea, buy up all the otherwise-useless mining rigs based on high end graphics cards, rework the chips as needed , hook up DIY watercooler and make a black hole/FaH/superconductor/etc simulator with them.

    Just because they are worthless for Litecoin doesen't mean those cards are paperweights.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Plenty more altcoins out there for idle GPUs

    Primecoin and Protoshares just got GPU miners.

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