Disclaimer: I am not a miner or a gamer, so don't go too hard on me if this is a ridiculous idea.
Would it be possible to mine Dash on consoles (PlayStation, Xbox etc)?
I've had someone offer me a PS3 fairly cheap and I'm probably going to go ahead and get it because I've read that with a little tinkering I can put Linux on it, set it up as a media centre, play Blu-ray discs and maybe even play the odd game or two that he's throwing in. I don't know know if the PS4 or any of the Xboxes can run Linux but I imagine that if the PS3 can, at least it may be theoretically possible to mine with.
I'm sure I'm not the first cryptocurrency enthusiast to come up with the idea though, no doubt someone here will know how viable it is. At what sort of electricity prices could it be profitable?
Well, a quick google search shows that they've made a miner for Bitcoin. Notes I've found is that some of the latest firmware blocks the ability to run linux on the PS3, but maybe it can be dialed back. But the biggest problem is to find a miner for X11 that runs on their video card, which isn't AMD or Nvidia. So actually, I'm gonna say no. The Bitcoin miner was created back in 2011 when everyone was still mining on a GPU, and I think the interest has died away.
it's true, Sony released a firmware in 2010 that blocks installing other OS like Linux
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-update/ i know because I used to run YellowDog on there. I think you can downgrade with a dongle but then you can't use psn. now you have to pay for psn on ps4. shame because Cell processor was awesome. Walled garden at it's best
EDIT: i don't think current X11 miners would work on their anyway like TanteStefana2 said, it has custom RSX graphics chip. but Cell processor had 8 parallel processing units, would be interesting to try to parallelize X11 on their directly, probably not that useful though
I did some folding on my PS3, which uses the GPU similar to mining. But is wasn't very efficient - I think it was close to a 7850 in speed but used 250 watts. You would be better off with a 750TI that only uses 50 Watts with about the same hashrate. And a 750TI is barely profitable with most electric rates.
Unfortunately, even folding is now cutoff from the PS3 apps so you can't even donate to a good cause.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ps3-stanford-folding-at-home-FAH-Folding-home,18609.htmlThanks guys for your input.
In this article from December 28, 2014 it does mention "For those sceptical that the now 8-year-old hardware is still cost-effective,
even with free consoles it is marginal. RAM is an issue and modern graphics cards are each equivalent to 20 PS3s.":
http://hackaday.com/2014/12/28/college-researcher-makes-supercomputer-from-420-ps3s/Obviously the PS4 is more powerful I imagine more efficient and would be a better choice but without looking into it too much, seems to be even more locked down than its predecessor.
I think I'll get the PS3 anyway, it definitely looks possible to put a GNU/Linux OS on it as well as the normal PS3 system, either by jailbreaking or downgrading and should be possible to access PSN too if I'm not mistaken, and to dust off the old PS2 games that must be around somewhere and play them too! Anyway, starting to get off-topic here, so I'll leave it that.
