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

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#201

Post by jiofih » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

dreen wrote: post #154

berdario wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

0.5kg of CO2 per kWh is the average for electric grids around the world.

1kg of wood produces around 2kg of CO2, every 400g of firewood gives you 1 kWh, so 0.8kg CO2/kWh.

That’s slightly worse than mining. Bitcoin is wasteful in its total energy consumption which is not reused, but 99% of the power you put into that GPU will be released as heat.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#202

Post by 3np » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #195

3np wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, at a certain point (and indeed during normal market conditions, which right now isn't) there's an equilibrium. As global hashrate goes up, as you not, profitability goes down, which makes miners switch to other chains, or, eventually, power down their rigs. I think your initial statement is correct, but from the wrong direction; if the ETH price is at 900$, the incentive to mine is less, some of current has…

I didn't specify a direction, so I'm not sure how I can be describing the wrong one? My point is that the price of ethereum doesn't have to move at all and yet his mining rig will become unprofitable after a time. The hash rate will increase and/or more efficient miners will come online, leaving his equipment needing to mine faster or use less electricity in order to generate the same returns.

I misinterpreted your comment then, apologies!

But, it's not a given that we'll have a significant enough increase of miners for that to be the case and time will tell (unless you happen to have knowledge I don't!)

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#203

Post by nr2x » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #200

hutzlibu wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then why is there no serious competitor?

>> no serious competitor? There are plenty. There is no mirror corporation doing exactly the same thing under a different name. But there is no mirror to Microsoft, Google, Apple or any other large tech corp. These are corporations backed by ironclad IP laws meaning nobody can every play on exactly the same field. For something like facebook, the competitor is all things not facebook . Every time you share a new stor…

The competition for Facebook is owning the social graph as a means to fuel advertising profits. Google+ failed, sure. Instagram would have been eating Mark's lunch right now if he didn't buy them, and he knows it.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#204

Post by wil421 » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:08 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #103

trungdq88 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are the houses centrally heated l? I live in the Southern US and we do not have harsh winters. Most houses are heated by gas or electric furnaces (central air).

It’s interesting you can also use remote cooling from lime pits.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#205

Post by medstrom » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

virgo_eye wrote: post #48

medstrom wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Produce electricity? I assume electricity was used to do the computation in the first place, turning into let's say 80% work and 20% heat. The idea was to use that 20% to heat our homes. The original electricity still needs to come from elsewhere.

No, essentially 100% of energy used for computation will turn into 'waste' heat. If you calculate 1000 digits of pi, those digits will not embody any energy.

Just turning chaos into order takes thermodynamic work, but I was wildly off with my percentages. Thinking in terms of an idealized computer that doesn't create heat, but didn't realize how far we were from that.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#206

Post by Tijdreiziger » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #51

ryankrage77 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by the vaguness of the site, I wouldn't be suprised if they're mining bitcoin for themselves while you pay for the electricity. Edit: Dug around some more, looks like they're building a BOINC-like service? https://computing.qarnot.com/en/

If I remember correctly, they pay for the network and electricity use of the heater. They rent the platform for computation to other third parties. So you, store and cool the computer for free. They probably sell directly to buildings and municipalities during construction, so it's installed and left there. So you either just rent it for a nominal fee or pay nothing.

Sounds like what Nerdalize tried to do in the Netherlands, but IIRC they went bankrupt not long ago.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#207

Post by andy_ppp » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

elwell wrote: post #197

> Some crypto currencies (don't call them "crypto", that's lame and wrong) "Cryptocurrency" is more than twice as long in letters and syllables. I think we've reached the point where "crypto" is disambiguated in most contexts from "cryptography", or did the author have a different reason for calling that abbreviation "lame and wrong"?

Crypto is an abbreviation of cryptography, by trying to force the abbreviation to mean a specific subset of cryptography you limit all future uses of the word crypto to mean crypto currencies which seems excessive. We might have other words that follow crypto in future.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#208

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #171

nr2x wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then why is there no serious competitor?

https://friendi.ca is a serious competitor doing mostly the same things as Facebook. (Except it's a social media site first, instead of an ad network first.)

But you probably don't need social media.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#209

Post by afarrell » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #128

Graffur wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was discussed before on HN. You say that like the conversation is resolved?

It 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.

I think you might be underestimating the amount of work required to achieve real consensus among humans.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#210

Post by tallanvor » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

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.

Electricity doesn't have to be a bad option for heating. Norway gets 88% of it's electricity through hydropower, another 10% through wind, and the rest of it is geothermal, as an example. That doesn't mean that electricity is necessarily the most efficient option, or the cheapest, but it is clean.