So, on top of buying Ethereum mining contracts with my STEEM power-down proceeds, I have spun up (pun intended) a terabyte's worth of (formerly) free disk space on an old Gateway tower system to mine Burstcoin.
This cryptocurrency is different that others, which rely on either CPU, GPU, or ASIC hardware: Burstcoin uses unused space on hard drives to store your set of possible solutions to the 'next block', then you (and possibly your pool-mates) attempt to 'solve' the block and submit the solution before others do. It is novel, it does not require special systems to be built (not that you can't do so), and seems efficient from a power perspective. Since this is an old system, if the hard drive (which remains active during the mining process) 'burns out' from over-use, I am not out anything.
I tried a few others, but this was the first that I could get working on my meager budget for hardware ($0) and time (next to zero). I have seen videos of people with arrays of external drives, but their ROI is challenging, and I am more inclined to run what I have as an experiment, measure the success (or lack threof), and adjust as required.
I'll keep y'all posted.
