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I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

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Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#371

Post by danans »

amackera wrote: post #304
danans wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because a CPU isn't a consumable resource, like electricity or labor. You should occupy the CPU with all valuable work (for whatever definition of value) but keeping it pegged for no reason makes no sense, and just wastes electricity.

In a way, by not running useful work 100% of the time, you're wasting the resource of time.

I would argue that there is a lot less useful work available to run per unit available CPU time than there is time.

Otherwise, there would be market for people to sell their spare CPU cycles.

The only entities selling CPU cycles are big cloud providers who have much higher utilization in general.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#372

Post by piracy1 »

drran wrote: post #289
xenocyon wrote: post #276

1. At an individual/hobbyist level this is a fine thing to do, if one is already a cryptocurrency enthusiast. 2. At a social/planning level it is important to remember that opportunity costs matter, and this should not be recommended as public policy. One kWh of electricity could either be used for mining bitcoin (creating at most one kWh of indoor heat), or it could be used for running a heat pump[*], yielding multi…

Definition of efficiency (from Google): the ratio of the useful work performed by a machine or in a process to the total energy expended or heat taken in. Heat pumps are >100% efficient. Usually, we cannot convert all input energy into useful work, so efficiency is always 100% efficiency.

I consider personal enrichment as a sort of useful work as it stands to replace my own 'useful work'

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#373

Post by missedthecue »

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?

Competition to what? Facebook's main product is ads.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#374

Post by adrianmonk »

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…

The concept makes sense, but I'm not sure the numbers work out. Heat pumps are pretty efficient, something like 300 to 400%. Are you really going to use less than 25 to 33% of your living area and also not provide any heat at all to the other areas?

Also, with forced air heat pumps, you can usually adjust the registers (air vents) to reduce the flow of air to unused rooms.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#375

Post by abeppu »

Geee wrote: post #335
Spivak wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What happens when banks break the consensus and what is needed to prevent that?

I think the banking regulator and or justice system in the relevant country step in. Being in a modern society with laws seems to be the main, partly effective preventative measure. If we're going through the work to have laws and courts and regulatory bodies anyway, and if we have the FDIC etc, why shouldn't we get a partly-trustworthy financial system out of it? I mean, of course, not that the people are trustworthy, but that records of what you deposited, withdrew, transferred etc will be respected.

Even if you own crypto, I'm guessing you have a bunch of money in other assets in accounts managed by financial institutions. How often has the bank just decided that you don't own that?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#376

Post by lgessler »

Aachen wrote: post #334
rblatz wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most electric heaters are heat pumps which are significantly more efficient than heating via resistive or mining. In fact a heat pump's efficiency is about 300%.

Just to be sure, you're not talking of those €20-50 electric heaters right? Because you say "most" and afaik those are pretty much the only ones people have unless they're in some fancy new building or have a fancy AC and paid extra for that option.

GP's referring to HVAC systems you'd find eg in a relatively new (1980s+) single family home in America

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#377

Post by bigiain »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #337
xenocyon wrote: post #276

1. At an individual/hobbyist level this is a fine thing to do, if one is already a cryptocurrency enthusiast. 2. At a social/planning level it is important to remember that opportunity costs matter, and this should not be recommended as public policy. One kWh of electricity could either be used for mining bitcoin (creating at most one kWh of indoor heat), or it could be used for running a heat pump[*], yielding multi…

An alternative to using heat pumps is to use gas heating. Gas heating lets you achieve >100% "efficiency" relative to electric heating because you don't have to pay the price of converting the gas into electricity.

This section of this book:

https://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_150.shtml

Has some calculations that show that using gas to generate electricity (in a modern gas fired power station) which you then use to run heat pumps for heating - is overall more efficient than just using the gas for heat given real world numbers. (It does go on to show the limitations of how much ground-source heat pumping you can do without freezing the ground - his ballpark numbers suggest maybe only 25% of the heating requirements for a typical British suburb could be met with just ground-sourced heat pumps before you'd freeze the available ground...)

(That whole chapter starting back on page 140, and the whole book - are well worth reading in my opinion.)

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#378

Post by bigiain »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #362
gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like there should be a way to have NiceHash sign their binaries or otherwise vet with Microsoft so Defender can automatically allow it. Setting an exception seems like it makes it a target for other malware to hijack or piggyback on.

A signed binary won't help. Cryptominers fall into the "Potentially Unwanted Program" category, along with remote access software like a VNC server. They're not malware, but can be installed maliciously. If Windows Defender finds a cryptominer, it has no way to determine if it was deliberately installed, so it flags. Manually excepting the directory NiceHash installs the miners is the only way around it.

I wonder if other actual malware now actively looks for that directory to opportunistically install itself into if available?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#379

Post by bseidensticker »

alasdair_ wrote: post #330
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…

I have a 3090 and cheap-ish electricity. Is it actually worth doing GPU mining again? I thought that died out long ago.

Mining bitcoin no, but other cryptocurrencies yes.

Sounds like with the run crypto is on right now, you can make some pretty decent money.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#380

Post by bigiain »

alasdair_ wrote: post #330
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…

I have a 3090 and cheap-ish electricity. Is it actually worth doing GPU mining again? I thought that died out long ago.

Not for Bitcoin.

Other crypto currencies can work better though.

https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...

Claims you can earn ~$17 per day if you can get electricity to 10c/kWhr running a single RTX3090 but that's all mining Etherium (DaggerHashimoto) not BTC.

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