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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Electric heating is extremely uncommon in Germany (like 1-2 % of households use it).

Paying 41c/kWh for ökostrom / 100% renewable energy here, and doing some mining with two 150W Radeon 6000 GPUs to keep this computer room warm goes a long way to making it cost effective.

Using heat pumps also makes it almost on par with the cost of natural gas.

Heat pumps don't work below -10C, so this really depends on the local climate. You can use geothermal heat pumps, but now you're no longer near par.

Depends. The ones sold in Poland (and I guess Germany as the climate is similar) are often rated to work from -25C up.

Heat pumps are also loud.

Just as fossil fuel boilers are.

That's why you install them in the basement. If you can.

They really aren't. The outdoor units are comparable to air conditioners (60 db). I can't hear mine through the walls.

Exactly. All electric heating should be replaced by GPUs. If you need to heat up a room with electricity, at least do some proof of work along the way.

GPUs are just resistive heating with extra steps, COP 1. Heat pumps can do way better most of the time.

Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free" since you're using it for heat anyway.

Heat pumps require a significant capital investment which would have to be recovered on only their efficiency improvement, since they don't otherwise generate revenue.

The math is different for new construction. There heat pumps make a lot more sense because the capital cost is relative to some other heating system you don't already have. Then the higher efficiency will generally cover the relative capital cost even if it wouldn't cover the total capital cost. This might still be less profitable than mining cryptocurrency (depending on a variety of factors) but better than any other traditional heating system.

> Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free"

No it isn't. I know because I looked into it.

Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop.

So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.

That's because you're using Bitcoin, for which custom ASICs are a thousand times more power efficient than commodity hardware and so commodity hardware is useless, but custom ASICs are stupid expensive.

What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)

Which cryptocurrency would work for example? Monero?

The returns from CPU mining are really low. The advantage is you can use your existing PC(s) and not buy anything.

Tom's Hardware did a list for GPUs:

https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-mining-gpus-ben...

"Which cryptocurrency" will also vary over time since the prices are all over the place, but that's the other advantage of not-ASICs. You can switch to whichever one pays better this month.

"Heat pumps can do way better most of the time."

Sure, but they are so rare at present thay in my entire life I have not even seen one.

Your 100% renewable energy mentioning sounds like you believe this and use it as an excuse to make it okay.

Ignore my comment though if you would normally heat by electricity but you use an umlaut so i assume you are a german as well.

Just a few days/weeks ago we had an extreme price hike due to high demand. High demand should only come from consuming energy in a usefull way. Mining your shitcoins for nothing is not helping at all.

You still consume energy which wouldn't need to be consumed as we do have other and much more energy friendlih systems for transaction security.

You are basically an american who drives the biggest pickup truck available and using oekofuel and state its now okay to do this.

If gas is used for both heating and electricity production, or share any other fuel source, the prices of electricity and heating will still be related.

Don't forget heat pumps. EV sales have also increased recently.

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