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I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

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Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#61

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

mtsr wrote: post #55
inter_netuser wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not wasted. This is the most common misunderstanding on this forum. Miners are required to provable expend effort in order to become eligible to produce a block. 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism, as it cannot be reversed. If you were to improve efficiency by routing excess heat for other purposes, it will gradually spread across the entire mining industry, and eventually you end up right whe…

Which is OPs point. The energy has to be wasted, or else everyone will do it to reduce cost and the difficulty just goes up until the net mining reward is similar to what it is now. And that for something that’s almost exclusively used for speculation, because for anything else transactions costs are too high...

Sure, but if the rebates result in wasted energy instead being used for good, then we’re getting an energy benefit while getting better power.

Hell, dont pay people, if I was mining and it was similar costs to donate the wasted energy I’d do it.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#62

Post by dmos62 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #53
dmos62 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I must point out that you shouldn't do this in most circumstances, there are environmentally friendly ways of heating your house. What aspect do you think could be friendlier to the environment? Rare metals and production emissions in high tech electronics? Or the fact that it's using electricity (as opposed to more isolation)?

Your electricity likely comes from burning coal. Coal pollutes quite badly. Other ways to heat a dwelling are more efficient. For example natural gas heaters burn cleaner and energy losses are much smaller compared to all the conversion losses (by the time you produce a BTU of heat from electricity, several BTUs of energy have been lost due to conversion losses, while burning gas is much closer to perfect efficiency…

But electricity isn't inherently dirty, right? It's probably better to have the network shift to greener sources than have every consumer do that individually.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#64

Post by pedrocr »

The explanation of needing to pre-heat the air into the heat pump is strange. Modern A/C systems can pump heat at 500%+ efficiency even with very cold outside temperatures, no pre-heating needed. Replacing that with resistances is a 5x or more reduction in efficiency. That heat pump doesn't seem to have an outside unit so may be less efficient but it would need to be very poor to go down to only 100%. Installing a proper A/C system would provide both much higher efficiency heating in winter but also add the capability to cool in summer when the solar panels are actually providing a lot of energy.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#66

Post by lmilcin »

VMG wrote: post #41
lmilcin wrote: post #10

I 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…

Cryptocurrency mining doesn't actually require huge network load

I don't consider cryptocurrency mining as overall beneficial for humanity.

You know, humanity has this huge issue of CO2 in atmosphere, maybe you have heard of it?

We are building more and more renewable sources, but cryptocurrency mining is countering these benefits to a considerable extent.

Additionally, even if we are able to produce 100% energy from renewable sources it still requires energy to scrub carbon from our atmosphere and so any energy put in bitcoin could be used for like saving our planet.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#67

Post by htk »

inter_netuser wrote: post #47
lmilcin wrote: post #10

I 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…

It is not wasted. This is the most common misunderstanding on this forum. Miners are required to provable expend effort in order to become eligible to produce a block. 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism, as it cannot be reversed. If you were to improve efficiency by routing excess heat for other purposes, it will gradually spread across the entire mining industry, and eventually you end up right whe…

I don’t think GP misunderstood what miners do. What I believe he means by wasted cycles is that the final product in crypto doesn’t have any practical purpose aside from what was agreed on by convention. For any other purpose it’s a wasted effort. This calculation power could instead be used to try to find new practical knowledge, like protein folding to use on new medicine etc.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#68

Post by progval »

speedgoose wrote: post #22
freetime2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He has an advanced ventilation system but what he describes is not a heat pump.

I too was skeptical at first, but it does look like this is a heat pump. Heat pumps take as "input" a stream of air at temperatures T_cold and T_hot (T_cold You can see these four pipes here, around component (1): https://pictshare.net/1024/sbmusz.jpg

T_cold comes from outside and T_hot comes from inside; T_verycold and T_veryhot go to the outside and to the inside.

However, the efficiency of the heat pump decreases as T_cold lowers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump_and_refrigeration_cy... ).

So by "preheating" T_cold with the bitcoin miner, the efficiency of the heat pump itself increases.

However, the efficiency of the whole system (heat pump + miner) decreases when you have the miner on. (Otherwise, heat pumps would just have a built-in heater to do it.)

So adding the bitcoin miner decreases the power efficiency of the whole system; but it may increase the monetary efficiency, if the revenue generated by the miner is high enough to compensate for the increased power usage.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#69

Post by monkeydust »

exdsq wrote: post #15
lmilcin wrote: post #10

I 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! https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/203.pdf

Any coins / tokens that implement this or something similar?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#70

Post by bouncycastle »

inter_netuser wrote: post #47
lmilcin wrote: post #10

I 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…

It is not wasted. This is the most common misunderstanding on this forum. Miners are required to provable expend effort in order to become eligible to produce a block. 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism, as it cannot be reversed. If you were to improve efficiency by routing excess heat for other purposes, it will gradually spread across the entire mining industry, and eventually you end up right whe…

It's a fallacy that high hashrate means high security.

What matters is the % of miners that are honest. (See bitcoin.pdf)

High hashrate just means higher difficulty. (The difficulty controls the average time between blocks, so it's always targeting to be 10 min on average).

Also, for heating your home, mining bitcoin could end you up with a loss. For example, your heater needs an internet connection, and your heater is will become out-of-date very quickly as new more advanced bitcoin mining gear becomes available. You would also need to have your heater on 24/7 to break even, this it will cost you to turn off the mining heater due to warm weather or to cool it.

Not to mention the noise.

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