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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

A dude I know has cheap electricity on his allotment garden where he built a wooden hut/cabin. He uses three PCs built from throwaway parts to heat the hut in the autumn and early spring (in winter there's nothing to do there).

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.

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That auto switching software is a joke. It doesn't actually get any more profit and likely costs money.

I had a setup like this back in 2013 and it worked very well, mining profitability changed everyday between altcoins.

You have to assume that the cost of switching is less than the difference in profitability. Computing that is nearly impossible. It is a case of not knowing what you're losing, but feeling like you got a good deal at the same time.

At least for GPUs, the cost of switching workloads on the fly, is actually quite high.

You got downvoted by people that know nothing about mining it seems.

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".

Nicehash got "hacked" [1] for 60m (at the time). Some claim they just "hacked" themselves, but nobody really knows. For some reason, people kept using them, but I wouldn't trust their stuff at all.

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-...

He's stealing from society to feather his own nest. I'll bet he also thinks this makes him smarter than other people.

In a society as large as ours, I think it generally is strictly smarter. Personally I think it’s detestable for ethical reasons.

well, if he was going to be running a space heater otherwise then this is basically the least harmful instance of mining

That's a pretty inefficient space heater

It's close to 100% efficient in converting electricity to heat.

anything that converts electricity to heat, by whatever means, is essentially equally efficient in doing so.

How is it stealing? He's paying for the electricity, the same price as everybody else who has an allotment in that community.

How is paying for electricity, at the price the provider offered, stealing?

Because the electricity was almost certainly offered for a specific subsidized purpose, likely being funded by a grant of some sort, and thus it is being misused?

Maybe, but then the heating itself would be the problem, not the mining on top of that.

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