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Comment by panpanna | Hacker News Reader

Well, we need to build houses with bitcoin miners for heat generation.

(Idea stolen from guy on reddit who actually did this)

Although I am not a fan of cryptocurrency popularity (mainly because of the potential to destabilize the macro economy), and I don't know much about this company: https://qarnot.com/en/home/, but I find they have a great name suggestive of thermodynamically optimal computing, Carnot being the father of thermodynamic efficiency. Carnot came up with thermodynamics to optimize steam engines, maybe making him the most steampunk of scientists. Thermodynamically optimizing bits is an echo of that for the cyberpunk age.

And who is gonna foot the bill for the mining?

You already pay to heat your house, what if you could be paid to hear your house?

Your house is not necessarily heated with electricity.

Running an ASIC 24/7 would use up like $285 worth of electricity per month if you pay 12 cents for each kilowatt-hour.

So about the normal amount for heating a house here in Canada.

> Your house is not necessarily heated with electricity.

But it will be anyway, that's a matter of a few decades now. If you're currently replacing your heating system, I should hope you're switching to electricity.

Though I'd say let's get a heat pump and save like 2/3rds of the energy compared to making the heat from scratch. Depending on the climate you might need some additional heating a few weeks per year, and then yeah sure let's do mining, but that's not a stable basis for a cryptocurrency's security.

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