Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

blog.haschek.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 419 posts

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#141

Post by bryanrasmussen »

cinntaile wrote: post #120
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sure, but I suppose it makes sense to the person making the downvote. And when it makes especially poor sense to me I start to think - maybe they see something I don't?

on edit: I do sometimes also get paranoid and think, man there is just someone who doesn't like me and automatically downvote when they run across my name!

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#142

Post by ClumsyPilot »

hectormalot wrote: post #94
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.

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?

Miniscule % of people have heat-pumps. In UK most people use either a gas boiler or a dumb electric heater. And you can't even install heatpump in an an apartment building without re-constructing half of it.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#143

Post by UncleMeat »

lmilcin wrote: post #107
lrem wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A heat pump is just a backwards air conditioner. Not whatever you are thinking it is.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#144

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

Wth is this "low-quality heating from datacenters"?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#147

Post by Haemm0r »

pedrocr wrote: post #64

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 pr…

"Modern A/C systems can pump heat at 500%+ efficiency even with very cold outside temperatures, no pre-heating needed."

Name a source please.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#149

Post by inter_netuser »

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…

A) 100% honest miners, 1 hash per century. B) 55% honest miners, 1 googol hashes per second.

What is more secure in your view?

hashrate is absolutely necessary for high security.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#150

Post by jgtrosh »

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…

Apparently nobody here has mentioned Gridcoin yet: https://gridcoin.us/
Post reply on HN