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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact.

For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.

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Yeah, except the days of mining bitcoin in your closet are long over, and a substantial part of the energy budget for the datacenters we're actually talking about is cooling.

This doesn't matter at all. It's a flaw in principle, which will sooner or later manifest. This is the case for any definition of "work" the system encodes, that comes down to the fatalistic reductionism of "increasing entropy". At some point your house becomes an oven, while the systems starts folding random amino acid chains.

'Work' cannot be losslessly reduced to heat generation and market value does not represent contribution to human welfare.

It's the fallacy of conflating correlation with causation, when the free market economic systems aligns with human interests for a moment. And PoW crypto currencies aim for giving up all governance control to this fallacy. Earth becoming absolutely oxidized into a lifeless rock a valid possible equilibrium for free market economic systems.

Isnt this kind of like saying we should bring back incandescent light bulbs so people will heat their houses with them?

Like, I appreciate trying to dual purpose energy use... but I dont see a specialized computer that pumps heat as practical. I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater. My 800w box doesn't generate anywhere near as many BTUs as a 600w ceramic box heater. Even though I may joke otherwise. While on hot days in Florida, there is a difference when it's on or off in a room... on the 5 actual cold days we get, it can barely keep my feet warm. When I lived in Colorado... Haha no. The little office I had with a buddy, there were 4 servers in a room, either rendering or doing video analytics crunching. They didnt do shit when ambient was 60f, plus our desktops. Using bitcoin miners as home heaters seems as practical as Juiceroo was to "fresh juice".

800 watts is not actually very much heat. A typical small space heater is 2000W. I have no idea what you intend by implying that 800 watts is not as many BTUs as 600 watts--watts are literally a measure of power, i.e. can be converted to BTUs per hour. And yes, all those 800 watts of power your computer draws do end up as waste heat [1].

> I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater.

That makes no sense. You literally cannot "waste" waste heat, unless you are venting it to outside or something. If your space is not getting warm enough, it's because your computer is not generating enough heat!

[1] only a very miniscule amount of the power consumed by a PC actually permanently flips bits on harddisks or SSDs or transmits bits across the network. These take extremely low amounts of power.

Once you understand this, you start to understand how the recent FUD about crypto is generated by people with an agenda.

Or people who live in places that aren't cold every moment of the year

Inefficiently though.

Electric heaters are only 100% efficient at turning electricity to heat. We can do a lot better than that

I know that in theory a heat pump can do better, but in cold enough climate it can't because one side collects condensation and freezes making it less than 100% efficient. So no, we can't do better.

Use geothermal heat pumps in cold climates.

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