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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

#91

Post by trungdq88 »

mrweasel wrote: post #87
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…

Currently a Facebook datacenter in Denmark is supplying around 10.000 homes with heating. You can argue that Facebook isn't actually doing anything useful, but still, it's better than to waste the generated heat.

Fascinating! Is this true? Do you have a link? Thanks!

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#92

Post by vbezhenar »

ryankrage77 wrote: post #50
rypskar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several useful BOINC-projects, for protein folding you have https://foldingathome.org/ , the projects mine computers use most time on are the projects at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org . You can find lists of projects at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php and https://www.boincstats.com/page/projectPopularity . Interesting idea to combine it with larger heating than to heat a room or two. Many will…

> Many will probably argue that it is an ineffective way to create heat. Electrical heating is as close to 100% efficient as you can get. Every watt your computer uses ends up as heat. Generating those watts from non-renewable sources is much less efficient though. I wonder if it's possible to calculate when the benefit of contributing to BOINC projects outweighs the CO2 generated.

Heat pumps have >100% efficiency. It's better to use AC to heat your house as long as outside temperature is not too cold.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#94

Post by hectormalot »

ryankrage77 wrote: post #50
rypskar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several useful BOINC-projects, for protein folding you have https://foldingathome.org/ , the projects mine computers use most time on are the projects at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org . You can find lists of projects at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php and https://www.boincstats.com/page/projectPopularity . Interesting idea to combine it with larger heating than to heat a room or two. Many will…

> Many will probably argue that it is an ineffective way to create heat. Electrical heating is as close to 100% efficient as you can get. Every watt your computer uses ends up as heat. Generating those watts from non-renewable sources is much less efficient though. I wonder if it's possible to calculate when the benefit of contributing to BOINC projects outweighs the CO2 generated.

Residential sized heat pumps can do '400-500%' efficiency (i.e. 4-5kWh of heat for every kWh of electricity), so electrical heating at 100% efficiency is indeed inefficient. If the calculations are really valuable it could still be worth it though.

Also, what would you do in the summer?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#95

Post by crote »

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…

The problem here is that densely populated cities generally aren't in need of heating: keeping them cooled is a bigger issue!

From a heating perspective, there is basically zero demand for the kind of year-round low-quality heating a data center can produce. From a computing perspective, rare and uncontrollable bursts of computing power aren't desirable either and is a waste of hardware.

The article should be considered an edge case. The author already had hardware lying around for free and required zero usable computation. An in-ground heat buffer wasn't an option. Longevity of the hardware was irrelevant. Heat demand was quite small.

Does it work for a single person? Sure, why not! Will it work on a city-wide scale? Highly unlikely.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#96

Post by speedgoose »

celticninja wrote: post #35
speedgoose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is wrong when he calls his ventilation system a heat pump. The point of the heat pump is to pump the heat from outside.

Thats not how a heat pump works. It doesnt just take warm air from outside and blow it into your house, otherwsie they would be useless in winter. https://www.jerrykelly.com/blog/how-does-a-heat-pump-work-in... So this is a heat pump, it its taking heat from outside air, its just that in this case the outside air is first primed by running it via some cryptominers, which makes the heat pump work more efficiently.

> It doesnt just take warm air from outside and blow it into your house, otherwsie they would be useless in winter.

For sure. I'm not talking about the air but the heat. If the heat is generated by resistive heaters (his GPUs are mostly that) the heat pump may not have to work as hard to get enough heat but the total efficiency (including the GPUs) is not as good.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#97

Post by lupire »

Nextgrid wrote: post #86
monkeydust wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any coins / tokens that implement this or something similar?

The proof of work in tokens has to be a net waste of energy; the idea is that the proof of work is costly enough to prevent a 51% attack. Making the proof of work do “useful” things would lower the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an attack.

That's only true if the work is profitable for you and not something lie for folding@home

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#98

Post by lrem »

owlmirror wrote: post #90
oefrha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing computations hardly stores any energy anywhere (the energy stored in, say, magnetization in a magnetic disk is pretty much negligible), so almost 100% of electricity is turned into heat. The problem with this ~100% efficiency is that, if your goal is heating, you can move way more than 100% heat with 100% electrical energy if you use, say, a heat pump.

Heat pumps are not viable in a lot of cases, in an urban setting, it's probably the vast majority. So for the many cases were the alternative for heating would be burning fossil fuels, using electricity, ideally produced via renewable energy/nuclear, could be a superior alternative.

Wait, why heat pumps are not viable in an urban setting?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#99

Post by guerrilla »

Nextgrid wrote: post #86
monkeydust wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any coins / tokens that implement this or something similar?

The proof of work in tokens has to be a net waste of energy; the idea is that the proof of work is costly enough to prevent a 51% attack. Making the proof of work do “useful” things would lower the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an attack.

The linked paper says the opposite.

> This results in PoWs whose completion does not waste energy but instead is useful for the solution of computational problems of practical interest.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#100

Post by lmilcin »

vbezhenar wrote: post #92
ryankrage77 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many will probably argue that it is an ineffective way to create heat. Electrical heating is as close to 100% efficient as you can get. Every watt your computer uses ends up as heat. Generating those watts from non-renewable sources is much less efficient though. I wonder if it's possible to calculate when the benefit of contributing to BOINC projects outweighs the CO2 generated.

Heat pumps have >100% efficiency. It's better to use AC to heat your house as long as outside temperature is not too cold.

No, heat pumps don't have over 100% efficiency the same way hot water pumps that pump from municipal source don't have >100% efficiency in heating home (it uses hot water available from somewhere else).

Heat pumps engage some other source of energy so if you want to measure efficiency you now need to include that other source into account.

Since you are engaging natural source of energy you can measure how effective (not efficient in thermodynamical terms) your heat pump system is, by calculating how much energy it can transfer for energy put into the pump. But this has nothing to do with efficiency, which in case of devices used to convert one type of energy into another or moving energy from place to place is typically meant in its strict thermodynamical sense.

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