Feasibility of datacenter farming (and the risk of farmer centralization)

@phillip_rhoades at one of the links I referenced (Best farming hardware) you can see that small ARM-based farms “should” be fine (assuming the algo sends them some requests despite their slower response time and throughput compared to x86-based competitors). I have one such small system that I will try out during the beta.

In case of most altcoins, Proof-of-Work @ home seems difficult because those coins are unstable and the investment is usually dedicated (i.e. unlike with MaidSafe where you can use the HDDs to store your own data, compute-specific hardware can’t be readily repurposed for something other than Proof of Work mining).

In that Testnet to Mainnet Transition Plan post you can see that you’ll be able to try your setup during the beta so that will be a time to give it a try with a small (maybe 1 HDD?) setup and see whether it could be economical for you, and if so add more equipment prior to the mainnet launch.