Future humans will wonder why humanity wasted so much valuable time, effort and real for no reason.
I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
11–20 of 419 posts
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#12A more environmentally friendly solution is to get a heat pump.
The first sentence in the second paragraph explains that the author has a heat pump and what it does for them. The article then goes on to explain where the miners fit in.
He also says he doesn't actually have a real heat pump setup because it's too expensive.
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#13I wonder if we could make it even better and make smart heaters that instead of wasting calculations actually do something useful, something like folding proteins or some other computing load that doesn't require huge network load and can be easily distributed (something like SETI@home but actually useful). In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters underground and use that energy for heating directly…
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Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#14A more environmentally friendly solution is to get a heat pump.
Did you even read the article? He does have a heat pump. He just uses mining to pre-heat the air, reducing the energy consumption of the heat-pump when the weather is cold. When it gets really cold, heat pumps can lose some of their efficiency, so in that case this might not be much worse than just relying on the heat-pump itself. It's still not a net-gain environmentally speaking, I guess, but since he uses GPUs he…
He isn't using a heatpump. It's too expensive he says.
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#15I wonder if we could make it even better and make smart heaters that instead of wasting calculations actually do something useful, something like folding proteins or some other computing load that doesn't require huge network load and can be easily distributed (something like SETI@home but actually useful). In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters underground and use that energy for heating directly…
'Proof of Useful Work', as opposed to proof of work, is a thing!
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#16I wonder if we could make it even better and make smart heaters that instead of wasting calculations actually do something useful, something like folding proteins or some other computing load that doesn't require huge network load and can be easily distributed (something like SETI@home but actually useful). In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters underground and use that energy for heating directly…
For years in an apartment I generated heat using surplus servers folding proteins. Some servers that are still quite fast and only a few years old are pretty cheap on eBay. Dockerize the whole thing and it’s easy to start and stop. One time I woke up however and it was especially cold, I realized I had a network issue and my servers could not get any more work units...
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#17Future humans will wonder why humanity wasted so much valuable time, effort and real for no reason.
Bitcoin mining is still wastes half of the electricity of dormant (plugged in but unused) electrical devices in the US -- it's bad but we do other things that are worse
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#18I wonder if we could make it even better and make smart heaters that instead of wasting calculations actually do something useful, something like folding proteins or some other computing load that doesn't require huge network load and can be easily distributed (something like SETI@home but actually useful). In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters underground and use that energy for heating directly…
Produce electricity? I assume electricity was used to do the computation in the first place, turning into let's say 80% work and 20% heat. The idea was to use that 20% to heat our homes. The original electricity still needs to come from elsewhere.
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#19I wonder if we could make it even better and make smart heaters that instead of wasting calculations actually do something useful, something like folding proteins or some other computing load that doesn't require huge network load and can be easily distributed (something like SETI@home but actually useful). In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters underground and use that energy for heating directly…
I understand your point but it does gloss over the fact that the calculations are useful to the bitcoin network in terms of security.
Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you even read the article? He does have a heat pump. He just uses mining to pre-heat the air, reducing the energy consumption of the heat-pump when the weather is cold. When it gets really cold, heat pumps can lose some of their efficiency, so in that case this might not be much worse than just relying on the heat-pump itself. It's still not a net-gain environmentally speaking, I guess, but since he uses GPUs he…
He isn't using a heatpump. It's too expensive he says.
The second paragraph begins with:
> My house is heated (and cooled) with a central ventilation system powered by a heat pump.
He is definitely using a heat pump.