221–230 of 419 posts
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I understand your point but it does gloss over the fact that the calculations are useful to the bitcoin network in terms of security.
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.
> 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"?
A more environmentally friendly solution is to get a heat pump.
Did you even read the article? He does have a heat pump. He just uses mining to pre-heat the air, reducing the energy consumption of the heat-pump when the weather is cold. When it gets really cold, heat pumps can lose some of their efficiency, so in that case this might not be much worse than just relying on the heat-pump itself. It's still not a net-gain environmentally speaking, I guess, but since he uses GPUs he…
And it looks like the unit he has (assuming I've found the right one) uses a heat pump for producing hot water, but for heating the home it would often be paired with an external heat pump: https://www.nilanuk.com/domestic-solutions/compact-p/
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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…
I think you are thinking of something very different than what "heat pumps" actually are? They don't involve storing heat, they're just an inverse fridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
The first sentence:
"A heat pump is a device that transfers heat energy from a source of heat to what is called a thermal reservoir."
So yes, it involves energy storage.
The way this works is you store heat in the summer (warm up a lot of rock or ground underneath your house) and recover that energy in the winter by pumping a liquid through warm rock back to your house and use it as a heat source.
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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 efficiency calculation here measures only electrical power in vs heat energy out. Heat pumps are always listed with greater than 100% efficiency. There is no problem with the laws of thermodynamics of doing this and it’s even listed in text books with the explanation of how it is possible. 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,…
I'm not sure I understand the principle. A heat pump achieves a COP (coefficient of performance) of approx. 3-4 (e.g. by investing 1 kWh of electricity, a heat pump generates 3-4 kWh of heat by extracting from the surroundings, air or sole, 2-3 kWh). In this example, by pre-heating the air, you supply the heat pump with ~0.9 kWh of thermal energy (the miner will convert 900 watt directly to heat I would assume). So i…
If I were a HVAC company with WiFi thermostats, I would look into including miners in heating solutions.
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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.
- All newly build housing in the Netherlands must be without natural gas, thus either lower heat-grid or heat pump heating - People that use airconditioning for heating have a heat pump without being aware of it (if configured that way)
Finally, for any technology early in the adoption curve, the market share - or even the growth rate (%) - today shouldn't be taken as good indicators for future development. E.g. McKinsey famously underestimated the mobile phone market by 100x that way [1] and the energy predictions on the adoption of solar manage to underestimate installed solar power _every_ year. Instead, also consider growth-of-growth and network effects as adoption grows.
[1]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38716/did-mckin...
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Cryptocurrency mining doesn't actually require huge network load
I don't consider cryptocurrency mining as overall beneficial for humanity. You know, humanity has this huge issue of CO2 in atmosphere, maybe you have heard of it? We are building more and more renewable sources, but cryptocurrency mining is countering these benefits to a considerable extent. Additionally, even if we are able to produce 100% energy from renewable sources it still requires energy to scrub carbon from…
yes, it is exhausting
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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.
It's simply insulated pipes with hot water running underground. Homes in more remote places often use gas or electric heating.
