Brand new hard drives drop a lot in value once used. Buying 256 gigs of RAM (specially ECC memory) and 2080 TI is not exactly cheap either.

Oh, I forgot a super important bit. Using a 2080 TI/consumer grade GPU for cloud purposes is against Nvidia terms.

To avoid being sued you need a Tesla GPU, the cheapest one is $7,374

Datacenter license only counts if you're leasing out the hardware directly. It's fine to use consumer grade but you can't subdivide it or sell it to customers (for ML as an example)

Bit of a grey area: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

Quoting: “To clarify this, we recently added a provision to our GeForce-specific EULA to discourage potential misuse of our GeForce and Titan products in demanding, large-scale enterprise environments.”

According to this article, they want to discourage but I would expect legal retaliation if FileCoin proves to be profitable. There is one area where AWS never launched: gaming servers and I suspect this could be the reason.

Its almost always specialized cause crypto mining software for proof of work extensively uses GPU to increase hashes per second rate.

This is filecoin. Afaik it's storage-based, not compute-based.

I looked at the requirements earlier and was blown away. Their official recommendation is three servers with some very expensive hardware. Three Epyc processors, one machine with 128GB of RAM (and a lot more swap space), and one with 2x GPUs. And all that to "seal" like one TB an hour. But it's OK, because this is totally not a proof of work system.

https://filecoin.io/vintage/mining-hardware-config-testnet-v...

How often (on average?) do you need to seal each TB you have?

For example if it's four months and you can do a terabyte per hour then that's about 3 petabytes and the cost of the sealing servers is a small fraction of the cost of the storage server. Is it much less?

But also the tweet says something about one terabyte per day?

You only seal (the expensive operation) when you add power.

Once you stop sealing you don't need to seal again for ~1 year (depending on your sector lifetime).

Keeping storage power is a cheap computation in comparison.

Assuming one is starting off by sealing pledged sectors, they would also need to re-seal any such sector upon upgrading to store actual content pursuant to some deal they have accepted.

I'm assuming there is probably not enough real storage demand yet, so large miners will end up pledging sectors a fair chunk of the time, in order to increase their power, at least while they have spare disk space remaining.