Once a year or so I check on the prices of used miners to see if it would be reasonable to use one as a space heater. Payback period has never been low enough for me to be comfortable with it. (If you buy $300 of equipment and mining becomes illegal tomorrow, then those miners are worthless.)
Bitcoin’s intrinsic value seems to be as a way of turning $100 of electricity into $1 of currency.
If you look at GPU mining, a single RTX 3090 setup (assuming you already have a computer to put it in) requires electricity cost below $0.05/kWh to have break-even in 1 year.
The sunk cost here is my existing forced-air electric heat, which is already installed in my house and already turns 1 watt of electricity into 1 watt of heat, or the other space heater I bought ten years ago and can easily put anywhere I need spot heating. If the goal is turn electricity into heat and nothing else, then I am already well supplied with ways to do that.
It's sunk cost if you already have a miner and need a room heater.
What the sales people neglect to tell you is their efficiency drops precipitously as the temperature approaches zero.
Heat pumps are much more consistently efficient in their other configuration as an air conditioner.
Assuming you had already bought the mining rig, it would continue to function as a heater regardless of legislative changes, and act as a redundant system to your existing heaters to boot.
doesn't matter, though; just buy a space heater if you want a space heater.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/business/china-cryptocurr...