[starttoaster]

I'll refrain from talking too much about it, as I'm actually somewhat associated with the project, so take that as a disclaimer. But the first example that comes to mind is Chia's Proof of Space (and Time) which requires some amount of initial computationally expensive work to be performed to create what is essentially your hashes on disk, and then your farm (their verbiage for "mine") can be ran off of external hard drives connected to a Raspberry Pi.

Anyway, I'll forgive you for maybe not knowing about it, as it's a much smaller and newer project than the likes of Bitcoin or Ethereum. It's a nice project to point out though, as you don't need to be a whale to be a player and sign blocks. I just run about 24 terabytes of plotted out space on spare drives that I had laying around that I rotated out of my Plex server. I still get a win every now and again, but my cost to get going was extremely minimal.

There's a lot of FUD spread around about Chia chewing through SSDs for the initial work portion, which is maybe somewhat true? I used a couple of SSDs to generate my plots that I now use for video game storage that are perfectly healthy, so my advice to people spreading that FUD would be to use higher quality SSDs that are rated for high TBW (terabytes-written.)

[sennight]

Ah, yeah I'm familiar with it - a PoW scheme, where the work is memory cell wear. I feel for anyone who missed the incredibly short period of time where bitcoin gpu mining pools were anything but distributed space heaters... but I don't see a future in trying to chase that dragon. At least it isn't a mindless hardfork cash grab, or an unintentional joke like that time that communist redditors came out with a coin that would randomly delete balances at rest.