I heat my home by mining crypto currencies • Hacker News Board

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#151

Post by dudul » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

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…

Where does this claim that densely populated cities don't need heating come from?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#152

Post by wrycoder » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

In the winter, we move our electric food dryer into the kitchen, where it provides heat and humidity.

Before October, it’s outside, and is used to finish off the product from the solar dryer.

Edit: Maybe it would make sense to get the miner out of the attic and turn it into a food dryer.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#153

Post by dudul » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

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.

What a few of these "lot of cases" where they are not viable?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#154

Post by dreen » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

berdario wrote: post #34

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…

I'm in a similar situation, and I'm just using an electric heater... No fancy mining setup. But I'm also thinking, maybe actually this is for the better? (Not only for the stingy landlord, but for the environment). I mean, even if a heat pump is much better than an electric heater... Having to heat up only the rooms that need it, instead of kitchen, bathrooms, living room (plus the rooms of other flatmates who might…

Despite my precarious housing situation at the time, I also own a big house in the country over 150 years old. The main form of heating it originally were 2m tall ceramic furnaces, always placed so that they could heat two rooms at the time. You put material to burn in from either side, and after getting hot the furnace would keep heating the room for hours, and all it takes is a few logs of wood (that you later have to regrow anyway). I wonder how many bitcoins is that in term of environmental impact.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#155

Post by pmontra » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #130

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.

I don’t think any rational person argues that Facebook isn’t doing anything useful at all, lots of people value the connectivity and ability to share photos during lockdown. 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.

Or completely remove posts and keep only Messenger and Whatsapp. I've been using almost only Whatsapp and Telegram to share stuff with friends and groups of friends for a few years. If I want to read news I look for them either on Google News or on the very web sites that publish them, the ones I trust.

If Google and Facebook would block news on my country I wouldn't notice much.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#156

Post by arnaudsm » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #106

arnaudsm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heat pumps need energy to operate. Hence at low temperatures the best combo is electricity+heat-pump. So cryptomining+heat-pump is exactly the same, minus the e-waste.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#157

Post by nr2x » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #130

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.

I don’t think any rational person argues that Facebook isn’t doing anything useful at all, lots of people value the connectivity and ability to share photos during lockdown. 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.

The questions are twofold: does Facebook do more good than bad? Could the good be accomplished without much of the bad? The answers to both questions are arguably bad for Facebook.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#158

Post by tom_mellior » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

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.

> Making the proof of work do “useful” things would lower the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an attack.

How does this follow? If the work is so universally useful that it lowers the cost of the work, it lowers the cost for everyone. Not just "attackers", but "defenders" as well.

As it happens, Bitcoin miners mine not out of the goodness of their hearts but for financial profit. Bitcoin POW is "useful" to them: It gives them more money than they put in. They do it precisely because the cost of said work is lower than the returns.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#159

Post by Delk » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

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!

There have also been plans to do this in Finland, but most of what I can find is either marketing material or news articles discussing plans [1, 2] rather than actual achievements, so I'm not sure what actually became of it.

There's a brochure from the national innovation fund that mentions a town actually covering about half of its heating needs with heat from a data center, though. [3]

Swedish telco Telia also has had similar plans for a data center in Helsinki, Finland, and their website says their "goal is to recover and reuse all the heat produced" [4], but I'm not sure how much weight to give that since proclaiming a goal only costs a few words. It would be nicer if they said what they're actually doing at the moment even if it were much less than "all of it".

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-deep-underground-data-cen...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki...

[3] https://www.sitra.fi/en/cases/district-heating-from-data-cen...

[4] https://www.telia.fi/business/telia-helsinki-data-center

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#160

Post by simias » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

arnaudsm wrote: post #156

adrianN wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Heat pumps need energy to operate. Hence at low temperatures the best combo is electricity+heat-pump. So cryptomining+heat-pump is exactly the same, minus the e-waste.

Don't heat pumps work like a fridge/AC but backwards? That is, compressing the air inside to generate heat, then decompressing it outside where it gets extremely cold and is warmed up by the relatively hotter outside air?

If so I fail to see how cryptomining features in there.