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Comment by rjbwork | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'm mining on my new gaming PC right now instead of running my heater when I'm not doing anything intensive. I wonder if decentralizing the hardware into people's homes or putting it in very cold places that need to generate heat during winter would be a way to cut down on some of the excessive waste of energy and thus emissions.

EDIT: Some good points down below WRT heat pumps. I have a window unit AC/Heater for just my room so that I don't need to run the whole house's AC/Heater the vast majority of the time. I'm not sure about heat pumps in such a small scale. Would it be more efficient to run a heat pump for a whole house than to mine to heat my one room?

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You're running a "resistive heater" which turns 1 unit of electricity into 1 unit of heat.

Heat Pumps can "pump" heat from the outside into the house, and this get more than 1 unit of heat from 1 unit of electricity.

True, but if you're already running bitcoin miners, then you can turn off or get rid of the heat pump and save on your aggregate heating costs.

It depends. Only if your (resistive-pump) cost difference is lower than your Bitcoin gains. That will depend on your geographical location though and the current BTC price.

Obviously we need a heat pump crypto miner

>I wonder if decentralizing the hardware into people's homes or putting it in very cold places that need to generate heat during winter would be a way to cut down on some of the excessive waste of energy and thus emissions.

This is already being done, especially the latter, in part because cooling is cheaper in cooler climes. Also some geothermal power is cheaper as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/how-iceland-be...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-miners-nordic-region-...

And, anecdotally, I know at least two people who have installed bitcoin mining farms under their floorboards and use them to heat the house in the winter. I assume there are more.

While that's arguably better than simply running an electric radiator, it's far more expensive than natural gas heating or a heat pump.

San Francisco has banned natural gas in new construction. And you'll need some heat source to get through those chilly San Francisco summers.

Even better would be to get better thermal isolation of your house.

Well, that's a really depressing solution.

The economy is supposed to exist to surve, not we fidn some way to minimize the oven to serve our PoW god

Lol. Well, I'm also making money at the same time, albeit only about $10/day. So I get to ultimately reduce the price of the hardware and not pay to run my heater.

Official sources say trees can absorb 3Gtec per year. That’s what we emitted in 1990. Since then we increased emissions by 2.5-3. So we need to divide by 3. And more than that, because what is already emitted is already warming the atmosphere.

So we can EITHER choose between heating our house, having a car or travelling once London-NYC per year.

We won’t reach it if everyone is finding excuses.

- You need to isolate your house so that human heating is enough to warm it up.

- Why is anyone even living so far up north. Barely no-one was living in Sweden in 1900, so why do we have to invent schemes so that you can do it (at great energy expense) when clearly, nature wouldn’t allow you to do it?

- Unless all the figures of IPCC scientists are fake, which I’m starting to doubt about, because I’ve studied feminism and I know it is possible to persuade an entire country of false figures. Let’s call that the “mass science” effect, where processes can be twisted in order to gain political leverage.

But if the “mass science effect” isn’t here, you sure shouldn’t think that using mining as a decent offline activity for your computer is a viable solution.

Pretty unrealistic standpoint here. Might as well not even try.

I’m using resistive heating in smaller rooms and it cut my gas usage to near 0, saving me almost 50% in electric and gas costs.

This is the only way to make people change their behavior: show them another way. A realistic way, and make it cheaper or otherwise more desirable for them in shorter timespan

It is unlikely that a GPU is an efficient heat source. Cryptomining should be done on green energy, or not at all. Generally, we should move away from proof-of-work based currencies.

> It is unlikely that a GPU is an efficient heat source.

This is plain wrong. A device that consumes N watts of power (and doesn't output electricity or some other form of energy) will eventually produce N joules of heat per second.

I met one guy on a meetup in the UK who installed BTC miners at his parents house in Russia. He told this is a practice in Siberia.

This is actually an interesting idea... We could power Bitcoin mining with solar energy, and then generate thermoelectric power with the heat it generates.

Do you realize that PC are not as energy efficient as an heater?

A PC is a resistance heater. Only thing more efficient is a heat pump.

Both PCs and fan heaters are 100% efficient at producing heat.

Actually, the "inefficiency" of everything is converted to heat. So, a PC is more efficient because it does useful work in the meantime.

How so? I was under the impression that all energy consumed by computers gets turned into waste heat, which is exactly what a heater does.

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