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Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#201

Post by jfim »

amarant wrote: post #155
arsome wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or ai…

I don't know about Canadian winters, but heat pumps certainly perform well in Swedish winters, which I don't imagine are much milder than Canadian ones. If you can get a water-water heat pump you'll be fine for sure (requires drilling a rather deep hole in your backyard tho, so the initial investment is a bit bigger)

I've heard before that the climate in Sweden is relatively mild considering its latitude, mostly due to the marine currents. A quick comparison of climate seems to suggest that this is the case: https://www.weather2travel.com/weather-comparison/?placename...

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#202

Post by deanclatworthy »

phire wrote: post #42

Looking at the picture, they are using really old bitcoin ASIC miners from 2017. A profitability calculator I found says this Antminer S9 can get $948/year of income in exchange for $1,371 worth of electricity. That's a loss of $422/year. Obviously it's not profitable to use anymore, unless you are literally stealing electricity like these guys.

I doubt they are mining bitcoin, probably the police just making assumptions at this point.

Also there is no way that this setup's electricity would cost that little in UK. The average cost of electricity bill for an average household is around £700 a year. If they paid, this would literally be thousands if not 10k+ a year in electricity bills.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#203

Post by henvic »

capableweb wrote: post #193
henvic wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked Bitcoin was a speculation madness. https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/

How does that come close to refuting the fact that using a Bitcoin miner as heating device also gives you Bitcoins, which the comment you replied to outlined?

The comment didn't outline this obvious point.

It tried to compare it with heat pumps.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#204

Post by tablespoon »

drewg123 wrote: post #191
phire wrote: post #42

Looking at the picture, they are using really old bitcoin ASIC miners from 2017. A profitability calculator I found says this Antminer S9 can get $948/year of income in exchange for $1,371 worth of electricity. That's a loss of $422/year. Obviously it's not profitable to use anymore, unless you are literally stealing electricity like these guys.

It seems like an ideal way to use excess energy in grid-tied solar setups where the energy company is not incentivized to buy excess power. Or for non-grid tied solar when your batteries are full.

> It seems like an ideal way to use excess energy in grid-tied solar setups where the energy company is not incentivized to buy excess power. Or for non-grid tied solar when your batteries are full.

The ideal way to use excess energy is to do almost anything else besides pointless proof-of-work computations (e.g some scientific distributed computing thing).

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#205

Post by awrence »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #182
awrence wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty brilliant actually. Case 1 electric space heaters blindly pass electricity through dumb wires. Case 2 instead of dumb wires you use ASICs. Case 2 is a win win that helps secure a decentralized monetary asset, get paid for it, and heat your home which you would have done anyway, all with the exact same carbon footprint (assuming you're expending equivalent amount of electricity to just heat your home as or…

Wow, this is actually amazing. In my country electric showers are really popular. They're literally just big resistances immersed in water. I wonder how long it'll take for them to put cryptocurrency miners in there.

My shower pays for itself :)

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#206

Post by eigenvector »

arsome wrote: post #146
bluGill wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just electrical rate, also what you do with the waste heat. I know at least one person who is heating his garage. Mining bitcoin is cheaper than an electric heater for the same task. A heat pump would probably be more cost effective in the long run, but I didn't tell him that.

Yeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or ai…

Air source heat pumps are fine for the places where most Canadians live including southern Ontario & Quebec and coastal British Columbia. If you live in Winnipeg or Saskatoon it might be dicey, but unless it routinely drops below -20C for extended periods you're fine. And you can have backup resistive heating elements for the occasional cold snap anyways.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#207

Post by oblio »

arsome wrote: post #146
bluGill wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just electrical rate, also what you do with the waste heat. I know at least one person who is heating his garage. Mining bitcoin is cheaper than an electric heater for the same task. A heat pump would probably be more cost effective in the long run, but I didn't tell him that.

Yeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or ai…

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#208

Post by bluGill »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #173
amarant wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Canadian winters, but heat pumps certainly perform well in Swedish winters, which I don't imagine are much milder than Canadian ones. If you can get a water-water heat pump you'll be fine for sure (requires drilling a rather deep hole in your backyard tho, so the initial investment is a bit bigger)

While geothermal systems do use heat pumps, the term "heat pump" in general conversation almost always refers to air-source heat pumps (air to air), not geothermal. In the US/Canada, drilling additional wells is prohibitively expensive for most people, which is why geothermal systems haven't taken off. Heat pumps don't perform very well, or at all, when it's -30° or -40°, so a secondary heat source is needed. Usually…

Heat pumps are cheaper than propane at least, though I'm not sure if they are enough cheaper as to be worth the cost.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#209

Post by bluGill »

Empf wrote: post #183
arsome wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is it's essentially just as efficient as a resistive electrical heater as all the energy used in your video card is converted to heat at some point in the process. There may be some very minor loss here, but I'm not enough of a physicist to say what it'd be.

That's what I'm wondering. It costs energy to move electrons

That energy is all turned into heat. Waste from the point of view of a bitcoin mining attempt. However heat is a useful byproduct in this case when the local temperature is lower than the inhabitant would desire.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#210

Post by Ardon »

drewg123 wrote: post #200
RobLach wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to storing it?

Ideally you'd store it, but if your system is sized for the short days of winter, you may have excess energy in the summer that you cannot store once your batteries are full.

It seems to me like you’d be doing a lot more good if you used that excess power for something like carbon capture.

Bitcoin is surely pretty far down the list of useful applications of that excess power.

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