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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

#101

Post by Graffur »

lmilcin wrote: post #33
celticninja wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point but it does gloss over the fact that the calculations are useful to the bitcoin network in terms of security.

This was discussed before on HN. The issue is building consensus protocol (in this case consensus that a transaction happened or did not happen). There exist no physics law that says that achieving this requires burning extraordinary amounts of energy.

> This was discussed before on HN.

You say that like the conversation is resolved?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#103

Post by mrweasel »

trungdq88 wrote: post #91
mrweasel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Most articles are in Danish, the best I could find quickly is: https://www.datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/facebook-exp...

Edit: It's should be noted that most Danish cities already have a remote heating infrastructure in place. Aside from the regulatory issues, it's mostly a question of hooking up datacenters and other heat producing industries to that infrastructure. In most places utilising the remote heating isn't voluntary, if it's available where you live, your home has to be connected.

Things like datacenters are slowly replacing coal fired heating plants, because most of those plants where made to generate electricity, but that's now supplied by more and more renewable energy. So cities need to find other sources of heat, to replace the volume no longer coming from the power plants. Where I live that's datacenters, waste incinerators and heavy industry.

As a new thing, remote cooling is now also attempted by using cold water from limepits.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#104

Post by lmilcin »

crote wrote: post #95
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 conside…

So where do you live exactly?

I live in Europe and I would say that heating IS life or death problem whereas cooling isn't.

See, there is this thing that is called hypothermia and if you take a look at the map and find where it is possible to die of hypothermia vs where it is possible to die of overheating, the number of people that live in places that require heating is much more than number of people that live in places that require cooling.

That may change in the future.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#105

Post by lupire »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

What is the $ cost of the power?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#106

Post by adrianN »

arnaudsm wrote: post #88
dreen wrote: post #3

Years ago when mining with a single gaming card was more common and viable, I lived in a rented room in a house owned by a live-in landlord who controlled the heating, and wouldn't turn it on for very long in the winter. Since electricity was included in my (fixed) rent, I was able to keep my room a few degrees higher than the rest of the house. However I must point out that you shouldn't do this in most circumstance…

In countries like France [1], electricity heating is the most environmentally friendly, at 40 g Co2/kWh, while gas (the cheapest and most common) is >250. [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/map

Even in France a heat pump will give you at least twice the heat for the gram of CO2.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#107

Post by lmilcin »

lrem wrote: post #98
owlmirror wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For many reasons.

First, transporting heat as opposed to electricity is very wasteful, so you only want to transport it in very short distances.

Second, typically even small single family home requires quite large volume to store the heat effectively for many months. It isn't that complex only because in a single family home setting you already have a bunch of uncontested land available so you can use the volume that is relatively flat and not too deep.

Building this on a scale of a city would be insurmountable challenge. You would have to dig deeper than the buildings are high and any kind of works like that are difficult in urban areas.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#108

Post by kuon »

I am always amazed that some countries allow electricity for heating.

Here it is mostly geothermal, solar, gas or oil (the last two being phased out). There are also a lot of cities with distant heating, for example, here, the garbage factory heat the whole city while burning the garbages.

But well, if you can mine crypto while heating, good I guess, even if there might be better ways to use compute power.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#109

Post by eurasiantiger »

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.

Can climate change be solved by crunching more numbers?
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