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Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

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Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#71

Post by pfraze »

eternalban wrote: post #69
pfraze wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have blockchains without decentralized consensus. It's how Certificate Transparency works. You have the contract host record all operations and output on a ledger, and then ship that ledger/log out to monitors. This improves the auditability of the system, and enforces the backend logic as a contract. Deviations from the code are detectable by replay, and then provable. Flag the host and readjust your trust.…

> You can have blockchains without decentralized consensus. That's pretty much something like Git.

Yeah, though we don't use Git to monitor active systems.

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#72

Post by njarboe »

ph0rque wrote: post #54
wallace_f wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty reasonable, but let's get really serious--You can be more efficient than that . This winter I may buy a bicycle-electric generator, an inverter, and use it to power my laptop to mine bitcoins. This heating beats a mere 98% gas heater by capturing generated heat most efficiently: Directly inside my body. The remaining kinetic and electric energy heats my house. And since I need to lose weight anyways, th…

How many miles cycled = one bitcoin mined?

To the moon.

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#73

Post by johnnywishbone »

Jhsto wrote: post #17

I used to increase my PC voltages every winter at my parents wooden heated house near the arctic circle. The room temperatures could drop all the way to 16C (60F) during the night. That allowed easy overclocks on my Athlon processor from 3 to 4Ghz. I still had to wear wool socks though, because the air pushing from the central unit would cause an annoying breeze of cold air onto my toes in the always chilly room.

I remember in college that we found it was cheaper just to use our computers to heat our crappy rented pad than to pay for heat and the electricity for our PCs.

Those were the days.

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#74

Post by rzzzt »

vlunkr wrote: post #55
wlesieutre wrote: post #3

Didn't watch the video, but a quick point on how the energy efficiency of this works out: Electric heaters are 100% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat. All the energy they take in, that's where it goes. Bitcoin mining (and computers in general) are basically in the same boat. There's some ancillary energy use for blowing air around or shining lights or making sound waves, but for the most part the elect…

Pretty clever, I've never thought about it like that. Basically they turned a computer into a heater that pays for itself plus some. Makes you think we should be building datacenters where the heat could be used, rather than just pumping it out.

There was an attempt to host servers in a similar setup in regular houses, not sure what happened to it (the article link doesn't seem to work, either): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334792

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#75

Post by s0rce »

nerdponx wrote: post #35
Jhsto wrote: post #17

I used to increase my PC voltages every winter at my parents wooden heated house near the arctic circle. The room temperatures could drop all the way to 16C (60F) during the night. That allowed easy overclocks on my Athlon processor from 3 to 4Ghz. I still had to wear wool socks though, because the air pushing from the central unit would cause an annoying breeze of cold air onto my toes in the always chilly room.

The room temperatures could drop all the way to 16C (60F) during the night That's what you call cold up in the arctic? That's definitely how cold my NYC apartment is every night from November through March. Heat is expensive!

Hah, my place in the SF bay area often gets that cold on cool nights, no insulation, single pane windows and heat is expensive, blankets and thick socks are cheaper.

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#76

Post by SilasX »

wlesieutre wrote: post #3

Didn't watch the video, but a quick point on how the energy efficiency of this works out: Electric heaters are 100% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat. All the energy they take in, that's where it goes. Bitcoin mining (and computers in general) are basically in the same boat. There's some ancillary energy use for blowing air around or shining lights or making sound waves, but for the most part the elect…

>It's not technically a measure of "efficiency", we call this the "coefficient of performance" instead.

I have to disagree. At its most general, the concept of efficiency means "desired output achieved per unit of scarce good expended" and can be applied in a variety of contexts: new users per dollar spent on marketing is a measure of your marketing efficiency, treasure value found per hour spent searching is a measure of your treasure-finding efficiency, etc.

Heat pumps are just a case where a) we use the same units for output and input even though they're different things, and b) in that unit system, the value for the output can be greater than the input. Since people can be unnecessarily suspicious of >100% efficiency, they use different terms for it.

If you expressed the efficiency as "2 joules of heat moved per joule of mains electricity consumed" you eliminate the canceling that would let you phrase the ratio as 200%.

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#77

Post by wallace_f »

ph0rque wrote: post #54
wallace_f wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty reasonable, but let's get really serious--You can be more efficient than that . This winter I may buy a bicycle-electric generator, an inverter, and use it to power my laptop to mine bitcoins. This heating beats a mere 98% gas heater by capturing generated heat most efficiently: Directly inside my body. The remaining kinetic and electric energy heats my house. And since I need to lose weight anyways, th…

How many miles cycled = one bitcoin mined?

I don't know, but according to this reddit post(1), I could hope to earn maybe 1 cent after a year of non-stop cycling.

But I would never be cold for a whole year.

1-https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6cf1wn/i_mined_bit...

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#78

Post by sorenjan »

nerdponx wrote: post #35
Jhsto wrote: post #17

I used to increase my PC voltages every winter at my parents wooden heated house near the arctic circle. The room temperatures could drop all the way to 16C (60F) during the night. That allowed easy overclocks on my Athlon processor from 3 to 4Ghz. I still had to wear wool socks though, because the air pushing from the central unit would cause an annoying breeze of cold air onto my toes in the always chilly room.

The room temperatures could drop all the way to 16C (60F) during the night That's what you call cold up in the arctic? That's definitely how cold my NYC apartment is every night from November through March. Heat is expensive!

It's very uncommon for homes to be as cold as 16C in Sweden, in fact if you rent you can demand that the temperature doesn't get lower than 18C, or 16C on the floor. It's probably because of better insulation.

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#79

Post by scott_karana »

ArchReaper wrote: post #19
acjohnson55 wrote: post #11

Of course, it would be cool if Bitcoin didn't require throwaway computation. Then we could use this computation for something that's actually valuable, like protein folding, or something, and still make use of the waste heat.

>it would be cool if Bitcoin didn't require throwaway computation Sure, but that's a technology that does not exist. If you can figure out how to create a blockchain-like concept, where the 'proof of work' actually contributes to humanity, you have invented the next big thing. Edit: Reading the comments below me, it looks like this is a space that is being actively explored. Exciting!

Folding and SETI @home existed for more than a decade. I've never understood why nobody mentions them for Proof of work. Maybe the work's not verifiable?

http://folding.stanford.edu

Re: Bitcoin mining heats homes for free in Siberia [video]

#80

Post by sorenjan »

in_hindsight wrote: post #4
subleq wrote: post #2

How much are they paying for power?

In Siberia power is paying for you! Seriously though in Irkutsk electricity is about 0.017usd per kilowatt/hour

How is it produced though? I'm guessing in large parts by fossil fuel.
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