Some Americans Are Trying to Heat Their Homes With Bitcoin Mining (cnbc.com) 90
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
[T]he computing power of crypto mining generates a lot of
heat, most which just ends up vented into the air. According to
digital assets brokerage, K33, the bitcoin mining industry generates about 100 TWh of heat annually — enough to heat all of
Finland.This energy waste within a very energy-intense
industry is leading entrepreneurs to look for ways to repurpose
the heat for homes, offices, or other locations, especially in colder
weather months.
During a frigid snap earlier this year, The New York Times reviewed HeatTrio, a $900 space heater that also doubles as a bitcoin mining rig. Others use the heat from their own in-home cryptocurrency mining to spread warmth throughout their house. "I've seen bitcoin rigs running quietly in attics, with the heat they generate rerouted through the home's ventilation system to offset heating costs. It's a clever use of what would otherwise be wasted energy," said Jill Ford, CEO of Bitford Digital, a sustainable bitcoin mining company based in Dallas... "Same price as heating the house, but the perk is that you are mining bitcoin," Ford said...
The crypto-heated future may be unfolding in the town of Challis, Idaho, where Cade Peterson's company, Softwarm, is repurposing bitcoin heat to ward off the winter. Several shops and businesses in town are experimenting with Softwarm's rigs to mine and heat. At TC Car, Truck and RV Wash, Peterson says, the owner was spending $25 a day to heat his wash bays to melt snow and warm up the water. "Traditional heaters would consume energy with no returns. They installed bitcoin miners and it produces more money in bitcoin than it costs to run," Peterson said. Meanwhile, an industrial concrete company is offsetting its $1,000 a month bill to heat its 2,500-gallon water tank by heating it with bitcoin. Peterson has heated his own home for two-and-a-half years using bitcoin mining equipment and believes that heat will power almost everything in the future. "You will go to Home Depot in a few years and buy a water heater with a data port on it and your water will be heated with bitcoin," Peterson said.
Derek Mohr, clinical associate professor at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, remains skeptical. Bitcoin mining is so specialized now that a home computer, or even network of home computers, would have almost zero chance of being helpful in mining a block of bitcoin, according to Mohr, with mining farms use of specialized chips that are created to mine bitcoin much faster than a home computer... "The bitcoin heat devices I have seen appear to be simple space heaters that use your own electricity to heat the room..."
CNBC also spoke to Andrew Sobko, founder of Argentum AI (which is building a marketplace for sharing computing power), who says the idea makes the most sense in larger settings. "We're working with partners who are already redirecting compute heat into building heating systems and even agricultural greenhouse warming. That's where the economics and environmental benefits make real sense. Instead of trying to move the heat physically, you move the compute closer to where that heat provides value."
During a frigid snap earlier this year, The New York Times reviewed HeatTrio, a $900 space heater that also doubles as a bitcoin mining rig. Others use the heat from their own in-home cryptocurrency mining to spread warmth throughout their house. "I've seen bitcoin rigs running quietly in attics, with the heat they generate rerouted through the home's ventilation system to offset heating costs. It's a clever use of what would otherwise be wasted energy," said Jill Ford, CEO of Bitford Digital, a sustainable bitcoin mining company based in Dallas... "Same price as heating the house, but the perk is that you are mining bitcoin," Ford said...
The crypto-heated future may be unfolding in the town of Challis, Idaho, where Cade Peterson's company, Softwarm, is repurposing bitcoin heat to ward off the winter. Several shops and businesses in town are experimenting with Softwarm's rigs to mine and heat. At TC Car, Truck and RV Wash, Peterson says, the owner was spending $25 a day to heat his wash bays to melt snow and warm up the water. "Traditional heaters would consume energy with no returns. They installed bitcoin miners and it produces more money in bitcoin than it costs to run," Peterson said. Meanwhile, an industrial concrete company is offsetting its $1,000 a month bill to heat its 2,500-gallon water tank by heating it with bitcoin. Peterson has heated his own home for two-and-a-half years using bitcoin mining equipment and believes that heat will power almost everything in the future. "You will go to Home Depot in a few years and buy a water heater with a data port on it and your water will be heated with bitcoin," Peterson said.
Derek Mohr, clinical associate professor at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, remains skeptical. Bitcoin mining is so specialized now that a home computer, or even network of home computers, would have almost zero chance of being helpful in mining a block of bitcoin, according to Mohr, with mining farms use of specialized chips that are created to mine bitcoin much faster than a home computer... "The bitcoin heat devices I have seen appear to be simple space heaters that use your own electricity to heat the room..."
CNBC also spoke to Andrew Sobko, founder of Argentum AI (which is building a marketplace for sharing computing power), who says the idea makes the most sense in larger settings. "We're working with partners who are already redirecting compute heat into building heating systems and even agricultural greenhouse warming. That's where the economics and environmental benefits make real sense. Instead of trying to move the heat physically, you move the compute closer to where that heat provides value."
How about using a heat pump? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hey, don't let your filthy facts get in the way of a shitcoin puff piece.
Who said it's a shitcoin puff piece? Quite clearing in TFA and even TFS they point out the futility of this approach. Did you read anything beyond the headline?
Re: How about using a heat pump? (Score:4, Insightful)
Heat pump > natural gas > Bitcoin miner > space heater.
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The absolute optimal would be transporting the miners to a cold location every season change of the year. (The trick would be, making sure they're not destroyed by the renter, and constant re-buying of hardware as things not only break, but miners age and get old and uncompetitive.) That's also assuming the person you're renting it from gives it back, you'd need a huge down payment to try and avoid this, making it only affordable to already rich people.
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The absolute optimal would be transporting the miners to a cold location
What, like the Fort Knox Mine in Fairbanks? I'm sure they'd be OK to work there if you paid them well, just remember that it's open pit when you post the job applications.
I almost do that... (Score:5, Funny)
I run GIMPS (the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) in colder months, so the additional 100-200 W from my PC running full produces additional heat the cat signals she enjoys, and as a plus I factor large numbers.
Re:I almost do that... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I almost do that... (Score:5, Informative)
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"I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm going to claim with confidence that..."
By your own admission you don't know enough math to make the claims you're making.
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You don't need to understand math to understand why something is done and why it is a waste of time doing it. It's not solving any problem at this point.
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That's only because there is no largest prime number. It's trivial to factor any prime number. The tricky part is proving that a number is prime.
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Not with that attitude!
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Admitting that I made the same mistake elsewhere years ago, one cannot factor a "largest prime number".
Insert simpsons meme here: Largest prime number so far. A native English speaker would understand this to be the meaning unless they were trying really hard to be obtuse.
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I can launch Folding@Home next time. However in the Prime numbers vs. blockchain I do favour the prime numbers.
The calculations of blockchain are entirely senseless, in that they will vanish in time when the blockchain technology is phased out and replaced by something else. (I personally have no interest in helping the blockchain.)
Prime, known non-prime and known factored numbers will stay engraved in stone for the foreseeable future. We only need to compute them once. M1277 (2^1277-1) is an intriguingly "
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That's too many numbers, some of them gotta be made up
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You can easily check with bc, the CLI, arbitrary-precision POSIX calculator. Type (2^1061-1)%(the number above without the spaces). It will give you the remainder of the division, which is 0.
NB I copied the number from https://www.mersenne.ca/expone... [mersenne.ca]
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I'm an American so I don't appreciate you pushing these woke Arabic numerals on my kids.
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There are sixes and sevens next to each other, clear signs that some gen alpha made the whole thing up.
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Could also run some World Community Grid tasks on BOINC, that's what I do.
But if you just want to heat your house nothing beats a heat pump for efficiency.
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and get hit with an capital gains tax bill / fine (Score:1)
and get hit with an capital gains tax bill / fine if you don't do all the paper work right.
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I don't pay tax on my wages because I spend all the money...
Yes
that's how stupid you sound
Re:and get hit with an capital gains tax bill / fi (Score:4, Informative)
It's considered a sale when you purchase goods with it. You owe capital gains on it at that point. At least if you're a US person.
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It's a private transfer/trade.
Every private transfer / trade of any asset that appreciates in value is subject to capital gains.
You can only earn a capital gain if you convert it to local currency.
Completely and utterly false.
Re: and get hit with an capital gains tax bill / f (Score:2)
If spend it you've converted it to fiat essentially. So you are liable for the taxes and probably some sort of fraud. If you simply hold it , you don't pay taxes until until you sell OR pay for something. If under $5000 (may be more now), you can say it's a hobby. But , I'd play by the rules. It'd suck to be made an example of for $5001 and go to prison.
What's old is new again/using wasted space (Score:3)
When I demoted my single Pentium 4 rig to workshop use
it noticeably raised winter temperature inside my
sealed 40ft High Cube shipping container machine shop.
It's not difficult to rack or shelve many computers near the ceiling or hang them off walls. I hang a 1U server off the wall of my office as one would a painting (and could cover it with a painting if I cared). Total cost is a couple of small lag hooks costing less than a dollar.
I don't do mini/tiny PCs for space reasons because there is more than enough unused space in most rooms to make that unnecessary, and for access a computer on the wall is hard to beat. Needing no desk my server doesn't clutter mine.
If I wanted mining rigs I could line walls with them high enough not to interfere with anything else with heating as a bonus.
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The question is, is it more effective than just running a heating coil? The point is for those people mining bitcoins at home, they will never make a single cent. So all you've achieved is make an inefficient (size wise) radiative heat that could be better replaced with a heating coil and a fan.
It remains the worst and most expensive way to heat.
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It (bitcoin mining) is the same efficiency as a heating coil. 100% of the electricity input is converted to heat.
NG heaters convert 60% to 90% of the potential energy to heat.
Heat pumps move up to 400% of the input energy to useful heat.
As far as bitcoin mining goes (I am only vaguely familiar with how it works) I think that you get "credit" for each number computed whether or not it is the solution so that when the actual solution emerges from the pool, everyone who contributed gets a share of the "coin".
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It (bitcoin mining) is the same efficiency as a heating coil. 100% of the electricity input is converted to heat.
Correct, but not all electricity input conversion is equal from your point of view. Here's a question, would you rather a) a radiative heater operating at 100% efficiency silently, or b) sit in a room with multiple mining rigs running with their fans flat out at 100%. There's more to heating than just efficiency.
I think that you get "credit" for each number computed whether or not it is the solution
You do. The problem is your are an inefficient pipsqueak in a mining pool that now in 2025 has reached an insane complexity. Your credit will be 0.0000fuck-all-of-nothing bitcoin for your effort. Un
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NG heaters convert 60% to 90% of the potential energy to heat.
I bet you could still make your point without lying about gas heaters efficiency.
Unclear on the concept... (Score:2)
WTF is a "clinical associate professor?" Another term for an idiot? If you heat with electricity, running a mining rig makes perfect sense, any energy used ends up as heat. Better to have a Bitcoin mining rig generating it than a nichrome wire.
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The BTC return has already tanked.
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No, I mean the difficulty is so high that mining out any BTC requires an enormous upfront investment.
Re:Unclear on the concept... (Score:5, Insightful)
Better to have a Bitcoin mining rig generating it than a nichrome wire.
The problem is that the mining hardware costs more than the amount it of Bitcoin it will ever generate in a reasonable amount of years, even if you're getting your electricity for free.
Realistically, this is one of those rare occasions where the first post nailed it - if you need heat, it's hard to beat the bang for your buck from a heat pump. Except maybe with one of those cheap Chinese diesel heaters, if somehow you have access to free fuel like this guy. [youtube.com]
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And if mining rigs didn't pay for themselves (where do you think new Bitcoin comes from?), no one would buy them (except other idiot "clinical associate professors").
If you pay normal US utility rates for electricity, you presently can't mine Bitcoin profitably. You're just effectively buying coinage through your power bill, on top of whatever you paid for the mining hardware. As per the article, this just results in slightly discounted heat, and there are better ways of achieving that end.
As to where new Bitcoin comes from, the amount of Bitcoin mined always stays the same regardless of the number of miners participating. The concept of having lots of people all att
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I thought the difficulty increased monotonically. If the number of miners went down, would it really be easier to mine?
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If the number of miners went down, would it really be easier to mine?
There's an interesting chart here [blockchain.com] showing the relationship between the market value and the mining hashrate. Less people mining does cause the difficulty to drop, but realistically we're talking small fluctuations - not anything that would suddenly make this gimmick of a heater profitable.
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I thought the difficulty increased monotonically. If the number of miners went down, would it really be easier to mine?
Yes. The difficulty adjusts itself so that on average one block is generated every 10 minutes.
The reward for finding a block goes down every 4 years.
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The only person wooshed here is you yourself. Bitcoin mining rigs don't generate any money, not one cent due to the specialised nature of mining. They are space heaters, ugly, noisy and oversized space heaters. Nothing more.
Where do new bitcoins come from? Dedicated mining ASICs which for a couple of watts of power can crunch more bitcoin than your best GPU on a good day. You're not getting any portion of the profits because you are horrendously inefficient at what you're doing.
except other idiot "clinical associate professors"
You know what is truly idioti
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My initial instinct was to scold you for "WTF is a clinical associate professor?" as thats a term that makes perfect sense for a teaching hospital.
But this dude is an economist? What sort of clinic would an economist work in, particularly an economist who specializes in crypto shit.
Though it does remind me of a story from the early bitcoin era of a guy who built a mining rig in his bedroom, and it heated the room so much he collapsed from heat-stroke and ended up in hospital with brain damage. Which I've ne
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"School of Business". They're obviously way outside their bailiwick. Probably a failed MBA. Mencken: "Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach."
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I live in an all-electric house.
I bought heatpumps within the first 2 years of buying it. Heating with resistive electric is expensive and inefficient (technically it's about 100% efficient... which is awful compared to a heatpump which can be MORE efficient... because it uses the tiny amount o of heat already present in the air outside your house, even in sub-zero temperatures).
My electricity bill is one-third of what it was when I moved in, purely because of heatpumps. By comparison, I have also moved a
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Do they make enough? (Score:1)
Do they make enough to cover the cost of the heater and electricity? Does it make much of a difference at least? Are these heaters going to become targeted devices for hackers?
The "Bitcoin heater" is (mostly) snake oil (Score:3)
According to the article:
The Heatbit Trio is basically a CPU with a radiant-heating coil stacked on top of it. On “eco” mode, it uses just 400 watts of electricity to power that little internal computer, which simultaneously runs the cryptomining calculations and also cranks out roughly the same, equivalent heating power.
So, you've got 400 watts of Bitcoin-generating heat, and the remainder of the heat is provided by a standard resistive heating element if you actually want the amount of BTUs that you'd typically get from a standard 1,500w portable space heater.
During an average eight-hour workday, I spent about 75 on electricity and typically earned a total of around 0.0000014 Bitcoin (BTC) per day. Based on the current value of Bitcoin, that’s roughly the equivalent of 14
Oh boy. So, let's ask our favorite LLM how long that'd take to pay for itself with the "savings" from mining Bitcoin. It estimated 54 years, running the heater for 8 hours every day in the winter. The good news is you'd have your 50-year-mortgage paid off by then, at least.
To be fair, the article does recommend just buying a standard portable electric space heater if that's what you really need. Although, its $70 recommendation is silly in its own right, as all portable electric space heaters generally put out the same 1,500w - so you might as well just grab the cheapest one at Walmart and call it a day.
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It really doesn't matter what they put out, all resistive heaters are 100% efficient (any inefficiency would result in heat anyway).
Are people buying new miners? Where does new Bitcoin come from - already amortized ones? Still, if that's what you have, it's better the heat from them than from a resistive element.
I don't see where marketing heat from a miner is any worse than the "Amish space heaters" which sell for $500 and make
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It really doesn't matter what they put out, all resistive heaters are 100% efficient (any inefficiency would result in heat anyway).
The idea being that a $70 1,500w heater isn't any better than a $20 1,500w heater, at least as far as producing heat goes. The more expensive ones might have a more accurate thermostat or produce less noise, but none of the typical resistance heaters sold at big box retailers give you any extra heat for your buck (damn those pesky laws of physics).
I don't see where marketing heat from a miner is any worse than the "Amish space heaters" which sell for $500 and make invalid claims about having better efficiency than a $40 milk house heater.
It depends entirely on if you consider the $900 for the Bitcoin heater a sunk cost, and also the fact that you're only actually getting 400w of heat from the Bit
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so you might as well just grab the cheapest one at Walmart and call it a day
Because you want all heaters to *sound* like a bitcoin mining rig running at full tilt? There's very good reason not to buy the cheapest heater you can find.
Wrong Algorithm (Score:3)
Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.
If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).
You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts, though if you want to invest in an EPYC and have other uses for it (maybe you have work jobs to run during the day and want more heat on cold nights) it could actually be profitable.
Resistive electric heating is still a very expensive way to heat, though some people don't have better options. There's a development near where I am that was built shortly after Nixon announced Project Independence and every house (cold climate) has wall-to-wall electric baseboard heating.
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In this case they can buy old ASICs and run those since they're just running them as resistive heaters. Any BTC they mine is just icing on the cake. Still sucks compared to a heat pump but whatever.
For the love of $DEITY, why not a heat pump? (Score:2)
For the love of $DEITY, why not just use a heat pump? It takes a fraction of the energy cost to move the heat, compared to generating it. If it is too cold, then by all means, use another heat source, but save the electrical heat for the actual cold weather.
Ideally, once it is too cold for a heat pump, one should go with natural gas, propane, or a fuel, just because it puts out more energy than electric and puts less stress on the grid. What would be ideal is having gas furnaces use the heat differential
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For the love of $DEITY, why not just use a heat pump? It takes a fraction of the energy cost to move the heat, compared to generating it. If it is too cold, then by all means, use another heat source, but save the electrical heat for the actual cold weather.
Exactly. And it is seldom too cold for a heat pump, if you buy a modern one. I have Toshiba Premium+ 25 bought a couple of years ago. It gives COP 2 in -30C (-22F). Costs around $2000, installed, here in Finland.
Why not house the homeless in datacenters? (Score:1)
Or next to them?
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Many of the homeless are drug addicts that would be happy to rip up the interior of a datacentre and sell it for scrap.
Re: Why not house the homeless in datacenters? (Score:1)
If you legalized drugs, how cheap would they be?
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It wouldn't matter, when you're dead-ass broke, you're going to lie/cheat/steal to get your fix whether it's $1/gram or $1000.
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Who cares, those crazy bastards will burn shit down just because they're smoking meth while high. There is no safely housing addicts.
Americans Catching Up (Score:2)
That's quite an old idea (Score:2)
qarnot computing has been doing that for about a decade.
The more things change, the more the same thing... (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid (Score:2)
I canâ(TM)t even begin to describe how stupid this is.
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Why? I mine Dictatorcoin AND Fartcoin every day by strenuously pedalling my soul cycle whilst saluting the flag and eating more raw beans than Cowboy Neal. Now Im proper toasty all day long, my legs are ripped and my voice is sexier than RFK Jr! Everyone nose ozone holes are a Canadian conspiracy!
Right on cue (Score:2)
As expected [slashdot.org] of Slashddot.
No. (Score:1)
Especially? (Score:3)
"especially in colder weather months."
ONLY in colder months, nobody heats their home in peak summer.
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ONLY in colder months, nobody heats their home in peak summer.
You apparently haven't met very many women, like my wife who uses her space heater even in june/july when I have to hide it from her....
Doesn't seem like it would be worth it, but... (Score:2)
The price of the hardware would make ridiculous to just shut your miner off when it's not cold, so you'd only get this heating benefit for a part of the year and still have to cool it the rest of the time. Also, as has been said elsewhere, gas or a heat pump would be more efficient.
I wonder if anyone has tried this as an electric pre-heater for hot water though. A closed liquid (oil?) system that pre-heated a water tank that supplied your electric instant-on hot water would be able to run year-round. Ada
100% Dependent on the Cost of Electricity (Score:2)
In California, New York, Hawai`i, and other high-cost areas, you'd be spending 4x on electricity to run this thing could expect to return in revenue.