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

261–270 of 419 posts

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#261

Post by Spivak »

afarrell wrote: post #209
ForHackernews wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look the actual problem as solved by BTC which is digital cash with no protections like chargebacks requires only one single trusted entity (can be more if we want) maintaining a very simple ledger of transactions operating in the open with auditing done by interested parties.

This is plenty achievable given that banking, which is far more complicated and messy, works. It doesn't not require a small country's energy usage to achieve human consensus.

BTC is super cool having created an pseudoanonymous digital voting system that's resistant to ballot stuffing but we're allowed to make stronger assumptions for our financial systems.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#262

Post by robocat »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #258
hokkos wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the average carbon intensity of french grid is in the 40g, if you take into account when heating is used it is more in the 80gCO2/kWh, anyway a heat pump is always better. http://www.carbone4.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Publicati...

France's electricity is largely generated by nuclear power which has minimal CO2 emissions.

True, but very misleading.

When you add a marginal kWh of electricity usage, how is that extra 1 kWh generated?

If France runs its nuclear power at nearly 100% utilisation, then if you add 1 kWh usage then that power comes from another source, which could be a high CO2 emitter.

The same goes for hydroelectricity: if all the hydroelectric power is already being utilised (no spillway), then you cannot claim that your electric car is being charged by hydro even if your country has a large percentage of it. There are complications when lakes are involved because whether your power usage is green or not often depends upon future inflows (lots of future rain = green; no future rain = dirty generation in future when lakes get low).

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#263

Post by polyterative »

qvrjuec wrote: post #259
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?

just limit power to maximum efficiency. My card mines eth 52MH/s@100% and 49MH/s@55% power

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#264

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

lupire wrote: post #105
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

What is the $ cost of the power?

About $20-25/month.

But it's not as if the cost of power is wasted. It's generating heat which I desire. If my GPU is consuming 300W, then that's 300W of heat that my heater doesn't have to generate.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#265

Post by coralreef »

qvrjuec wrote: post #259
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?

The only thing that really degrades is fans.

Running a GPU for ~3 years at 75-82c

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#266

Post by cwkoss »

qvrjuec wrote: post #259
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?

At those rates, the GPU will likely pay for itself before it fails.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#267

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

qvrjuec wrote: post #259
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?

No.

My GPU hovers at around 55-60 C while mining with the fans at 77%.

Years ago, I was running an AMD R9 290. THAT ran HOT. Even with fans at 100%, it would hover around 95 C and constantly fight with thermal throttling.

EDIT: And as someone else said, at these mining rates, it will pay for itself in 3-4 months.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#268

Post by cwkoss »

lupire wrote: post #97
Nextgrid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's only true if the work is profitable for you and not something lie for folding@home

How can you chain folding@home puzzles?

PoW requires that a block's solution proves that the solver had access to the previous block.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#269

Post by viklove »

tallanvor wrote: post #210
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.

That's awesome, but it's too bad they financed the construction of all that green energy through the sale of oil, which is obviously being burned.
Post reply on HN