On the PCs he runs an app that basically manages the mining for you, automatically switching between cryptos to get the most microcents per watt per second.
I have no idea why the allotment gardens got the cheap deal on electricity and I don't know if the mining gives him a significant "discount" on the heating.
At least for GPUs, the cost of switching workloads on the fly, is actually quite high.
And yes the auto switching which in this case is almost certainly nice hash is a joke. For years the only thing you would mine on a gpu has been ethereum.
Nicehash takes an absurd fee and their software might as well be return "Ethereum".
A lot of GPU miners really believe that since they are paid in bitcoin, they are mining bitcoin. Just look at any FB group of GPU miners. It goes to show that a lot of people really don't understand what they are doing at all, which is kind of neat actually... all this stuff still works even though the underlying infrastructure is run by people who don't even fully understand it.
[1] https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/66417/hacking/nicehash-...
In the short term, sure. There'll probably be fireworks for the next month or two. But thread ancestor might well be talking medium-long term where the economics are really simple - the amount of resources the miners put in to hashing will drop until they are making a profit again.
The miners will be profitable again inside 12 months. Even if all that means in practice is that "miners" is some kid in a basement in Khazakstan with an old Pentium.
Once bitten, twice shy? We’ll see.
It depends what you mean by mining at a loss.
It's never rational to mine when the cost of power is higher than the expected return. Turn off your equipment and go buy bitcoin directly.
Amusing fact: if we go look up dollar auctions [0] the process described sounds superficially like Proof of Work mining.
All in all agree than BTC will adjust is difficulty with long term economics, and so, it will not be quick, short-term actors will lose money.
No, a 1000 watt heater is just as efficient as a 1000 watt computer in heating.
Not to mention that heat pump efficiency isn't linear as it depends on the humidity and temperature in which it's operating.
Electric heaters more or less just lose energy in light that they produce, which is quite often negligible.
An electric heater uses 1000W of electricity to increase the energy in an air volume directly.
Heat pumps use 1000W of electricity to transfer energy from one area to another.
In the former case, the energy in the warmed air is entirely from the supply of electricity.
In the latter case, the energy in the warmed air comes from the intake air and the electricity is only used to move that energy around.
So absolutely a heat pump using 1000W of electricity can move 3000W of thermal energy from the hot side to the cold side.
This, by the way, is why you're absolutely right that efficiency is variable, as it depends on the energy gradient between intake and output.
Only in a closed system, heat pumps are not a closed system, they take advantage of ambient heat in the environment which brings efficiency above unity if measured as power input vs heat output.
As a result, the power is only going to be useful if you can move whatever consumes it to that location.
Since power demand isn’t entirely predictable, flexibility is rewarded in these markets. For example, if there’s a downward spike in demand that causes an imbalance, you can earn extra money by either having a power plant that can ramp down very quickly, or by being a consumer that can ramp up very quickly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if mining rigs participated in these spot markets. In theory, they should be able to adjust their power consumption within seconds.
BTW, it’s been theorized that overnight charging of electric cars could do the same thing and dynamically adjust the charging speed based on spot prices.
It's also under-provisioned but increasing supply is a problem because of excess energy.
So they started making deals with miners where the miners act as a sponge for excess energy and in turn pay much less.
Taking the same situation just more extreme (and likely more local) and being payed for handling excess energy doesn't seem absurd.
(I intentionally didn't judge anything about the Texas gird here, it's just meant as an example.)
We have no technology to quickly store and release huge amounts of energy.