Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

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at Starship's $100/kg placing your Eth mining $1000 GPU in space will add only 10-20% when amortized over 100 ton rig - it is comparable with building/buying your own small powerplant what large crypto have done. AI and crypto are exploding and only going more so. Granted, the planet is becoming too small a confines for it. It seems that AI and crypto will be the killer apps of space in near future.

One can also observe that humans have largest, among the animals of planet Earth, share of body energy consumed by brain and the future humans would probably have even higher share. In technology we observe the same - the pinnacle of technology - CPU - have practically 0 thermodynamic efficiency and the share of energy consumed by computers grows, and i think it will be only growing. Intelligence eats the world.

Could you clarify why you think placing crypto rigs in space is a good idea? To run a crypto rig, you need to provide a lot of power and have a mechanism to keep the processors cool. Being in space seems to make both of these substantially more difficult (especially cooling the electronics). It seems highly implausible to me that crypto will be the “killer app” of space.

How are you supposed to cool it in space?

Heatsinks optimized for radiative cooling, which are kept in the shade by solar panels. Works much better when half or more of your surroundings aren't a planet at human-scale temperatures, as is the case on earth's surface.

It'll be orders of magnitude cheaper to just make it waterproof and sink it in a lake.

Or be the company flogging the rigs rather than paying for the flight (insert saying about shovels in a goldrush)

spacecraft already have trouble venting waste heat without the burden of attempting to mine bitcoins

only because of very constrained weight budget (which is constrained by the high price of delivery into space) so you can't just throw in an AC with a radiator. The radiative power scales with the 4th of T, so it is pretty effective in space if you run the hot end of AC hot.

I suppose there were a lot of arguments about usability and various constrains/impossibilities 30+ years ago when cell phones only appeared at $1+/minute and were available only at a very few places. Yet here we are. The cheap access to space will do the same for various tech-in-space (how about unlimited access to space with fineprinted "cap of 1000kg/month" :).

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