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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

#111

Post by dgacmu »

kuon wrote: post #108

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.

Using an electric heat pump is very efficient, usually better than heating directly by burning gas. In many high efficiency houses, the leftover demand not satisfied by the heat pump is more easily satisfied by a small amount of electric resistance heating - and you get a double win if you don't have to run gas to your house at all, saving both the monthly gas connection fee, simplifying internal plumbing, and improving safety.)

Using electric resistance heating alone is usually bad, as you say.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#112

Post by aloisdg »

kuon wrote: post #108

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.

In France, the electricity is mostly nuclear. Heating with electricity is not a problem.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#113

Post by IgorPartola »

dmos62 wrote: post #62
IgorPartola wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. If you use solar panels you are definitely better off. The question is whether you are or not and for the time being most places still don’t use renewable energy sources.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#114

Post by aloisdg »

geek_at wrote: post #83
H8crilA wrote: post #63

What will happen to the cards once the crypto boom is over? There was a lot of trashed AntMiners out there after the late 2017 bubble, and with it a good amount of CAPEX written down.

they still make great LAN party GPUs. HL2 mp is not a problem and even ark runs on them somewhat

this is the way

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#115

Post by vgalin »

H8crilA wrote: post #63

What will happen to the cards once the crypto boom is over? There was a lot of trashed AntMiners out there after the late 2017 bubble, and with it a good amount of CAPEX written down.

This is only true for ASIC miners, ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) are pieces of hardware designed to do very specific things - e.g. mining crypto currencies. When these cards become obsolete or aren't profitable anymore, trashing them is almost the only thing you can do.

On the other side, GPUs, even if they are not profitable anymore to crypto currency miners, can still be used afterwards or sold back.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#116

Post by lmilcin »

I wonder if a country could produce bitcoin miners that convert electricity to heat and use that heat for their industry while also getting to control trillions in bitcoin once they cross 50% of mining capacity.

Most likely bitcoin would loose all value then as the value is basically product of trust in the bitcoin network, but still an interesting idea for a state-sponsored attack.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#117

Post by fiftyacorn »

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.

I think Amazon does the same with a datacenter and powers a refuge

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#118

Post by jki275 »

bouncycastle wrote: post #70
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…

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…

What matters is the % of miners who don’t collude.

Honesty isn’t the issue, collusion is. The entire concept of Bitcoin assumes dishonest players.

The only real attack is for miners to combine hash power to get over 50% of the network hash rate so they can execute double spends - and even that is self defeating as doing so degrades confidence and by extension price.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#120

Post by cinntaile »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #84
neilalexander wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The computing-heater warms buildings ecologically and for free, thanks to the waste heat released by embedded microprocessors. By performing complex IT operations... ... which are what, exactly?

looking through their tech stack and the hello world example and stuff I think you can put your own stuff i n it, but probably the most common stuff is 3d rendering. on edit: I got a downvote so someone must think I'm wrong? the basis of my idea was - in the FAQ https://computing.qarnot.com/en/FAQ 3D: Blender, Maya, V-Ray, Guerilla IA / ML / Big data or simulation: Code Saturne FreeFem OpenFOAM PyTorch TensorFlow Sic…

You have been here for a couple of years, surely you have noticed downvotes don't always make sense.
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