I remembered the coin I used to mine before Chia, it's MASS: https://massnet.org/en/
The coin is available to trade in MEXC or Huobi for example, but I didn't know anything about the roadmap, news etc
In my opinion, it's not lack of HDD minable coins, or lack of interest by the public, it's more about which problem the coin will solve? Why not choose any other available coin?
HDD mining in theory is awesome, less power to consume, easy to get HDDs (more decentralized), but the coin need a solid project, need to solve a real world problem.
The coin is available to trade in MEXC or Huobi for example, but I didn't know anything about the roadmap, news etc
In my opinion, it's not lack of HDD minable coins, or lack of interest by the public, it's more about which problem the coin will solve? Why not choose any other available coin?
HDD mining in theory is awesome, less power to consume, easy to get HDDs (more decentralized), but the coin need a solid project, need to solve a real world problem.
It's all about utility. There are so many coins on the market, but only a few provide real use cases to the world. HDD-mineable coins are no different. I've never heard about MASS until you've mentioned it now. I'm going to have to do a little research on it to see if it's worth it. Still, no other coin compares with Chia as it's the most profitable HDD coin to mine right now (if I'm not mistaken). Some would say HDD-mineable coins are more decentralized than ASIC-mineable coins, but that depends on how the network is structured.
I think HDD mining could pose a higher risk of centralization as data centers usually have a large number of HDDs at their disposal. Imagine if Google, or even Amazon takes control of an HDD-mineable coin with their huge storage space. It would've been a complete disaster. I don't think they will be able to manage to acquire large numbers of ASICs, as such devices are usually more expensive than ordinary HDDs. The industry is just starting to blossom, so I'm hopeful developers would come up with a solution to make HDD mining more decentralized. That is if the hype goes back up again.
Since Amazon and Google never showed any interest when the HDD mining was at their peak I doubt that they are thinking now to jump in to this mining,their datacenters and specifically their devices are being used for much better things than mining some low value coins like Chia now or Burst before.The mining depends completely on the GPU and ASIC devices and coins mineable on such devices,if these are successful and are doing well normally these can be considered as a factor to revive HDD mining but unfortunately we did not see such thing even when GPU mining was at our peak in the year 2021,even then HDD mining didn't manage to get the hype back,so most likely won't do now or in the near future,so I exclude a Google or Amazon and their datacenters involvement into this.