There is this company too: https://computing.qarnot.com/ It's built on the same idea but a more mature and more general solution to the same problem.
Hah! Qarnot is a good name for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine
Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
181–188 of 188 posts
Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
#182There's nothing new about this. I remember a story from the days of mainframes, where a data center had to be redesigned - they had built it without heating, expecting the mainframe to provide all the heat the building needed in the winter. By the time they got around to buying a machine to put in it the technology had progressed and it was much more power efficient than they had planned.
>the days of mainframes
Those days aren't over. Mainframes are still in serious use, at least in banks, and (I didn't know this until going to find the following link) apparently also have Blockchain support: https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/z14
Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
#183Of course, it would be cool if Bitcoin didn't require throwaway computation. Then we could use this computation for something that's actually valuable, like protein folding, or something, and still make use of the waste heat.
>it would be cool if Bitcoin didn't require throwaway computation Sure, but that's a technology that does not exist. If you can figure out how to create a blockchain-like concept, where the 'proof of work' actually contributes to humanity, you have invented the next big thing. Edit: Reading the comments below me, it looks like this is a space that is being actively explored. Exciting!
Grid coin monetises boinc contributions
Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love the idea ! I would love to work with you if I didn't have a nice project in the same time. Small error in the FAQ though: "kW/h" ;-)
I'll make sure this is fixed on Monday ! Thank you :)
If you are referring to the unit of energy it should be kWh as in (Energy / Time) * Time rather than unit power per unit time.
Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's not technically a measure of "efficiency", we call this the "coefficient of performance" instead. I have to disagree. At its most general, the concept of efficiency means "desired output achieved per unit of scarce good expended" and can be applied in a variety of contexts: new users per dollar spent on marketing is a measure of your marketing efficiency, treasure value found per hour spent searching is a measu…
> If you expressed the efficiency as "2 joules of heat moved per joule of mains electricity consumed" you eliminate the canceling that would let you phrase the ratio as 200%. But that's the performance. Efficiency is usually a measure of how good the performance is. In this case there's a practical reason not to call it efficiency, because there is a well understood maximum performance which is the Carnot limit, so f…
Heat pump takes energy from two sources, power grid and outside environment: air, landmass or water (there are even air+land models etc). Their energy output is always less than sum of sources, so their efficency is never over 100%. But as the ambient land/air/water heat is generally ”free” then we seem to get 3-500% economy. I have never even seen the technical/physical efficiency numbers for heat pumps as consumers do not care about this.
Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
>heat pumps are (effectively) more than 100% efficient The CoP of a heat pump is greatly dependent on the difference in temperature potential of the source and sink. If it's extremely cold outside, it's very hard to pump heat from colder air into a house. When the temperature potential between the two reservoirs is equal, sure the CoP beats out electric heating but when it's high (When your house is warm and the outs…
Your link is for Peltier coolers. This government study of an air source heat pump maintained a real world COP of ~3 in Connecticut: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56393.pdf It would be pretty bad to design a heat pump that dropped much below 1, better to just install a big resistive element.
Cool data. Appears the CoP vs outdoor temp plots are on page 14. Since the data doesn't provide temperature delta between the source and sink, you'd need to assume that the pump met the heat delivery requirements.
Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, I'm speaking more generally about bitcoin mining for heat, but it may make more sense in Siberia if electric heaters are the dominant heating method. There are other reasons electrical heating isn't great, heat pumps aside. An average coal plant (in the US in 2015, I'm using EIA numbers) was about 34% efficient in turning the energy in coal into electricity. Then you lose about 5% of that in transmission…
> Obviously you can't do that Actually, you can. I know a few people in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and upstate New York who use coal stoves to heat their homes.
You can burn coal, yes, but once you add a chimney you're not getting 100% of the heat like you would by building a fire on your living room floor. It's an energy tradeoff vs dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. And I assume they're worse pollution-wise than a power plant.
I'm not sure what the efficiency on those is today. Article from 1980 [1] mentions 74% for a good quality stove, it's possible they've improved, but I doubt there's been as much development work on coal burning stoves as there has for gas fired furnaces.
Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]
#188Towards the end of the video, the owner makes a point that this democratic distribution of mining power instead of large miners controlling the network is a good idea. Curious to hear more about this -- does anyone know good writing re: Democratic / distributed benefits of mining?
The bitcoin protocol is somewhat at odds with the desired goal of distributed mining. Only 1 entity gets the reward of mining a block, and only 144 blocks are mined per day. You are encouraged to join the strongest pools to have the highest chance of making money. According to blockchain.info, the top 6 mining pools control 75% of the market. https://blockchain.info/pools
Statistically the reward is the same whether you're solo mining or in a pool. Actually less in a pool because they take a cut of the profits. The benefit of being in a pool is that you get the (smaller, since they're shared) rewards more frequently instead of waiting possibly years until you solo mine a block.
But there's really no reason why you have to be in the biggest pool, if you're in a pool with a 1/144 share of the hashrate you'll already be getting daily income, why do you need it to be more frequent?
Note: I think solo miners also get a bit more average latency when receiving bloks, I'm not sure if that offsets the cut the pools take enough to make the expected value of being in a pool higher or not.