121–130 of 419 posts
You still have to pay income taxes on the mining reward (same for staking rewards). The 1 year period is only for capital gains, so only for the benefits made when selling the asset.
> If you keep your coins longer than the one-year speculation period, it's tax free. You still have to pay income taxes on the mining reward (same for staking rewards). The 1 year period is only for capital gains, so only for the benefits made when selling the asset.
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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…
The work of the heat pump is to move heat from one location to another, it does so with the byproduct of producing more heat, therefore it produces more heat energy than the electrical energy put in.
You’re right that conservation of energy says that the heat in being moved did come from somewhere but that’s outside the system, and you will always find heat anywhere but absolute zero. Calculations for turbines or engines don’t make any efficiency allotments for heat already in the air, which is also necessary for them to run.
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…
> 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)?
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> 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?
Im not sure what it’s doing but “folding@home” is doing biology simulations as it’s useful distributed computing, that can probably generate some warmth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
At the end of the day, Qarnot rents this infrastructure to other companies for computation and use the heat energy to heat stuff (air, water, warehouses, etc.). Not a bad idea.
[0]: https://greenfoldingathome.com/2020/05/25/how-to-make-a-fold...
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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.
This 31 page paper most definitely has not been fully evaluated by anyone commenting on it in this thread.
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.
The beauty of the PoW blockchain is that if a nation attains this kind of power, then still, the most profitable thing to do would be to keep playing by the rules. This is why bitcoin works.
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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?
Everyone except bitcoin bagholders can see that the BTC proof-of-work protocol is obscenely wasteful. There are already superior cryptocurrencies that use different consensus algorithms and have similar or better security/anonymity properties.
The thing I find funny about HackerNews is how you see plenty of wasteful hobby projects hit the main page. Yet someone using a crypto miner to generate heat / side money is somehow a terrible project.
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.
Facebook has a good and bad side just like humans do. For example, if Facebook got rid of the ability to post news, it would be a much better place.