7 ms·

Yeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and

by arsome 5y ago

Yeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or air conditioner, but my understanding is they perform quite poorly in Canadian winters.

Empf 5y ago
I'm very curious how that can be better then an electrical heater. It has to be more inefficient as you are not spending energy on calculation but if you substitute it with selling your bitcoins you would need to compensate your co2
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  Because it also generates revenue via bitcoin. So it's "cheaper" insofar as the bitcoin is subsidizing the operation of the rig and, as a byproduct, heating the space.
- arsome 5y ago
  My understanding is it's essentially just as efficient as a resistive electrical heater as all the energy used in your video card is converted to heat at some point in the process. There may be some very minor loss here, but I'm not enough of a physicist to say what it'd be.
  - Empf 5y ago
    That's what I'm wondering. It costs energy to move electrons
    - bluGill 5y ago
      That energy is all turned into heat. Waste from the point of view of a bitcoin mining attempt. However heat is a useful byproduct in this case when the local temperature is lower than the inhabitant would desire.
- awrence 5y ago
  It's pretty brilliant actually. Case 1 electric space heaters blindly pass electricity through dumb wires. Case 2 instead of dumb wires you use ASICs. Case 2 is a win win that helps secure a decentralized monetary asset, get paid for it, and heat your home which you would have done anyway, all with the exact same carbon footprint (assuming you're expending equivalent amount of electricity to just heat your home as originally planned). You've basically turned PoW into proof of heating where the miner gets paid and gets the benefit of heating his home on top. And incremental environmental impact is exactly 0. edit: quick google -> and here it is :) https://bitcoinminingheater.com https://bitcoinminingheater.com
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Wow, this is actually amazing. In my country electric showers are really popular. They're literally just big resistances immersed in water. I wonder how long it'll take for them to put cryptocurrency miners in there.
    - awrence 5y ago
      My shower pays for itself :)
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Now long showers aren't just relaxing but profitable too. Awesome.
  - Empf 5y ago
    But how much energy is used percentage wise for mining?
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Technically a "perfect" miner would use zero energy (beyond microamps for driving the signal wires in the network cables), the heat comes from imperfect components that "waste" energy by turning it into heat. So the mining itself doesn't use any energy, it's just that instead of dumping power into a dumb coil of wire, you dump it into a smarter coil of wires and various components that produce some output (that happens to be valuable to the Bitcoin network and it rewards you in exchange) as a side-effect. For any given watt of electricity, the heat output is the same, just that with a miner you also get useful calculation results out of it.
amarant 5y ago
I don't know about Canadian winters, but heat pumps certainly perform well in Swedish winters, which I don't imagine are much milder than Canadian ones. If you can get a water-water heat pump you'll be fine for sure (requires drilling a rather deep hole in your backyard tho, so the initial investment is a bit bigger)
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  While geothermal systems do use heat pumps, the term "heat pump" in general conversation almost always refers to air-source heat pumps (air to air), not geothermal. In the US/Canada, drilling additional wells is prohibitively expensive for most people, which is why geothermal systems haven't taken off. Heat pumps don't perform very well, or at all, when it's -30° or -40°, so a secondary heat source is needed. Usually, that will be natural gas, in which case why bother with a heat pump when you can just burn much cheaper natural gas?
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The context maters here. If a boat is being discussed, it won't be air to air.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      What's your point?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Heat pumps are cheaper than propane at least, though I'm not sure if they are enough cheaper as to be worth the cost.
  - amarant 5y ago
    Oh, in Swedish they're both called heat pumps, i didn't realize there was such a distinction in the English language between the two systems. In my mind they're just different kinds of heat pumps. And yeah, drilling is pretty expensive, but once the system is installed, heating is ridiculously cheap. When my parents installed geothermal, ROI was estimated to about 5 years for their house iirc. But then it may well be that drilling is cheaper here by virtue of being more common, idk.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. Have you actually done that calculation out? You say "primarily provided by", but I wonder what that means, given just how much electricity you need to actually heat a home via GPUs. (You may of course be saving money given the profit you generate, but that's not the same thing as reducing emissions.)
robocat 5y ago
> my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I think you are likely mistaken, although it is a surprisingly common misconception. Most places in the world, if you are using an extra kWh of power, the system needs to generate up to an extra marginal kWh from coal or gas. Example 1: France generates power 70% from nuclear. However if a French person uses an extra kWh during base load, that could easily lead to one less kWh exported, which would most likely mean one extra kWh is generated from say coal somewhere else in Europe. Example 2: New Zealand generates 60% of power from hydro. If I use an extra kWh of power at the moment (even at cheap rates), then if we have a drought in 6 months time, then an extra kWh needs to be generated from coal in 6 months time. I am presuming the coming critical storm[1] this weekend won’t fill our hydro lakes[2] and that the predicted long term dry weather pattern[0] will occur. I am a New Zealander. You could be right if you are only using your power when it is cheapest (which usually implies the usage of base load nuclear), although it is surprisingly difficult to actually figure out whether you have generated zero extra carbon. [0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/441393/hydro-power-more-dry-weather-may-mean-blackouts-switch-to-coal-generated https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/441393/hydro-power-more-... [2] https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/security-supply/hydro-information https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/security-supply... [1] https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/05/rare-red-weather-warning-issued-as-parts-of-country-to-be-hit-by-heavy-rain-flooding.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/05/rare-red-... Edit: on second thoughts in NZ I am sure our lakes can’t fill that quickly from one good storm - the inflow rate is limited by the size of the river and the inflow rate is small compared to the storage size?
- arsome 5y ago
  This seems like a silly way to look at production though - you could say every kWh in the system is a "marginal kWh" if you think about it like this. Turning on your oven, charging your car, etc would be similar in effect. If you really wanted to get involved you'd have to look at power imports and exports as well. While it's true that fossil fuels do provide an important role in variable management of the grid still, this is also accomplished with hydroelectric quite heavily in my area and over time the rates of each production method will adjust accordingly so I think it's still a reasonable assessment to look at overall production.
tzs 5y ago
Mitsubishi has heat pumps that maintain 100% heating capacity down to 23℉ (-5℃), and 76% down to -13℉ (-25℃). Fujitsu has similar technology.
eigenvector 5y ago
Air source heat pumps are fine for the places where most Canadians live including southern Ontario & Quebec and coastal British Columbia. If you live in Winnipeg or Saskatoon it might be dicey, but unless it routinely drops below -20C for extended periods you're fine. And you can have backup resistive heating elements for the occasional cold snap anyways.
oblio 5y ago
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
bialpio 5y ago
> I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat Except now you have to compare efficiency of your natural gas system vs efficiency of the power plant + electric heater. Chances are that energy efficiency of the power plant + an electric space heater (which is what you're turning your PC into) is smaller than the efficiency of your furnace. Quick googling comes up with energy efficiency of 60% for natural gas powered plants, while I don't think you'll be able to buy a gas furnace that has efficiency smaller than 80% these days... IIUC, the only way you can mine without worrying about energy usage is if you have electric space heaters in your home - then it doesn't matter if you turn on the PC or the heater. Or if you own solar panels and you are producing more than you are not able to use (or sell).
- bialpio 5y ago
  To summarize the part about efficiencies, by heating up your place with electricity instead of gas, the power plant needs to burn ~50% more gas (& so 50% more emissions) than you'd have to if you were to use your furnace. Intuitively, other fossil-fuel power plants will also cause larger emissions than you would locally (as they all start with burning stuff for heat & only then convert that to electricity with some losses, while you could stop there), but I haven't run the numbers. Thermodynamics is a b*tch.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Probably, though I live in an area where 50% of our electricity comes from the wind, so if the wind is blowing electric heat is far less CO2, while if the wind isn't blowing electric heat is far more.
    - bialpio 5y ago
      In that case the problem becomes what other poster mentioned: it's a zero-sum game so you increasing your energy consumption takes green energy from someone else. Maybe if you mined only when you knew that the energy would be curtailed otherwise? Not sure how to know that though...

by arsome 5y ago

Empf 5y ago

I'm very curious how that can be better then an electrical heater. It has to be more inefficient as you are not spending energy on calculation but if you substitute it with selling your bitcoins you would need to compensate your co2

CarelessExpert 5y ago
Because it also generates revenue via bitcoin. So it's "cheaper" insofar as the bitcoin is subsidizing the operation of the rig and, as a byproduct, heating the space.
arsome 5y ago
My understanding is it's essentially just as efficient as a resistive electrical heater as all the energy used in your video card is converted to heat at some point in the process. There may be some very minor loss here, but I'm not enough of a physicist to say what it'd be.
- Empf 5y ago
  That's what I'm wondering. It costs energy to move electrons
  - bluGill 5y ago
    That energy is all turned into heat. Waste from the point of view of a bitcoin mining attempt. However heat is a useful byproduct in this case when the local temperature is lower than the inhabitant would desire.
awrence 5y ago
It's pretty brilliant actually. Case 1 electric space heaters blindly pass electricity through dumb wires. Case 2 instead of dumb wires you use ASICs. Case 2 is a win win that helps secure a decentralized monetary asset, get paid for it, and heat your home which you would have done anyway, all with the exact same carbon footprint (assuming you're expending equivalent amount of electricity to just heat your home as originally planned). You've basically turned PoW into proof of heating where the miner gets paid and gets the benefit of heating his home on top. And incremental environmental impact is exactly 0. edit: quick google -> and here it is :) https://bitcoinminingheater.com https://bitcoinminingheater.com
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Wow, this is actually amazing. In my country electric showers are really popular. They're literally just big resistances immersed in water. I wonder how long it'll take for them to put cryptocurrency miners in there.
  - awrence 5y ago
    My shower pays for itself :)
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Now long showers aren't just relaxing but profitable too. Awesome.
- Empf 5y ago
  But how much energy is used percentage wise for mining?
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Technically a "perfect" miner would use zero energy (beyond microamps for driving the signal wires in the network cables), the heat comes from imperfect components that "waste" energy by turning it into heat. So the mining itself doesn't use any energy, it's just that instead of dumping power into a dumb coil of wire, you dump it into a smarter coil of wires and various components that produce some output (that happens to be valuable to the Bitcoin network and it rewards you in exchange) as a side-effect. For any given watt of electricity, the heat output is the same, just that with a miner you also get useful calculation results out of it.

amarant 5y ago

I don't know about Canadian winters, but heat pumps certainly perform well in Swedish winters, which I don't imagine are much milder than Canadian ones. If you can get a water-water heat pump you'll be fine for sure (requires drilling a rather deep hole in your backyard tho, so the initial investment is a bit bigger)

frosted-flakes 5y ago
While geothermal systems do use heat pumps, the term "heat pump" in general conversation almost always refers to air-source heat pumps (air to air), not geothermal. In the US/Canada, drilling additional wells is prohibitively expensive for most people, which is why geothermal systems haven't taken off. Heat pumps don't perform very well, or at all, when it's -30° or -40°, so a secondary heat source is needed. Usually, that will be natural gas, in which case why bother with a heat pump when you can just burn much cheaper natural gas?
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The context maters here. If a boat is being discussed, it won't be air to air.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    What's your point?
- bluGill 5y ago
  Heat pumps are cheaper than propane at least, though I'm not sure if they are enough cheaper as to be worth the cost.
- amarant 5y ago
  Oh, in Swedish they're both called heat pumps, i didn't realize there was such a distinction in the English language between the two systems. In my mind they're just different kinds of heat pumps. And yeah, drilling is pretty expensive, but once the system is installed, heating is ridiculously cheap. When my parents installed geothermal, ROI was estimated to about 5 years for their house iirc. But then it may well be that drilling is cheaper here by virtue of being more common, idk.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

> Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. Have you actually done that calculation out? You say "primarily provided by", but I wonder what that means, given just how much electricity you need to actually heat a home via GPUs. (You may of course be saving money given the profit you generate, but that's not the same thing as reducing emissions.)

robocat 5y ago

> my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I think you are likely mistaken, although it is a surprisingly common misconception. Most places in the world, if you are using an extra kWh of power, the system needs to generate up to an extra marginal kWh from coal or gas. Example 1: France generates power 70% from nuclear. However if a French person uses an extra kWh during base load, that could easily lead to one less kWh exported, which would most likely mean one extra kWh is generated from say coal somewhere else in Europe. Example 2: New Zealand generates 60% of power from hydro. If I use an extra kWh of power at the moment (even at cheap rates), then if we have a drought in 6 months time, then an extra kWh needs to be generated from coal in 6 months time. I am presuming the coming critical storm[1] this weekend won’t fill our hydro lakes[2] and that the predicted long term dry weather pattern[0] will occur. I am a New Zealander. You could be right if you are only using your power when it is cheapest (which usually implies the usage of base load nuclear), although it is surprisingly difficult to actually figure out whether you have generated zero extra carbon. [0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/441393/hydro-power-more-dry-weather-may-mean-blackouts-switch-to-coal-generated https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/441393/hydro-power-more-... [2] https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/security-supply/hydro-information https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/security-supply... [1] https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/05/rare-red-weather-warning-issued-as-parts-of-country-to-be-hit-by-heavy-rain-flooding.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/05/rare-red-... Edit: on second thoughts in NZ I am sure our lakes can’t fill that quickly from one good storm - the inflow rate is limited by the size of the river and the inflow rate is small compared to the storage size?

arsome 5y ago
This seems like a silly way to look at production though - you could say every kWh in the system is a "marginal kWh" if you think about it like this. Turning on your oven, charging your car, etc would be similar in effect. If you really wanted to get involved you'd have to look at power imports and exports as well. While it's true that fossil fuels do provide an important role in variable management of the grid still, this is also accomplished with hydroelectric quite heavily in my area and over time the rates of each production method will adjust accordingly so I think it's still a reasonable assessment to look at overall production.

tzs 5y ago

Mitsubishi has heat pumps that maintain 100% heating capacity down to 23℉ (-5℃), and 76% down to -13℉ (-25℃). Fujitsu has similar technology.

eigenvector 5y ago

Air source heat pumps are fine for the places where most Canadians live including southern Ontario & Quebec and coastal British Columbia. If you live in Winnipeg or Saskatoon it might be dicey, but unless it routinely drops below -20C for extended periods you're fine. And you can have backup resistive heating elements for the occasional cold snap anyways.

oblio 5y ago

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto

bialpio 5y ago

> I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat Except now you have to compare efficiency of your natural gas system vs efficiency of the power plant + electric heater. Chances are that energy efficiency of the power plant + an electric space heater (which is what you're turning your PC into) is smaller than the efficiency of your furnace. Quick googling comes up with energy efficiency of 60% for natural gas powered plants, while I don't think you'll be able to buy a gas furnace that has efficiency smaller than 80% these days... IIUC, the only way you can mine without worrying about energy usage is if you have electric space heaters in your home - then it doesn't matter if you turn on the PC or the heater. Or if you own solar panels and you are producing more than you are not able to use (or sell).

bialpio 5y ago
To summarize the part about efficiencies, by heating up your place with electricity instead of gas, the power plant needs to burn ~50% more gas (& so 50% more emissions) than you'd have to if you were to use your furnace. Intuitively, other fossil-fuel power plants will also cause larger emissions than you would locally (as they all start with burning stuff for heat & only then convert that to electricity with some losses, while you could stop there), but I haven't run the numbers. Thermodynamics is a b*tch.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Probably, though I live in an area where 50% of our electricity comes from the wind, so if the wind is blowing electric heat is far less CO2, while if the wind isn't blowing electric heat is far more.
  - bialpio 5y ago
    In that case the problem becomes what other poster mentioned: it's a zero-sum game so you increasing your energy consumption takes green energy from someone else. Maybe if you mined only when you knew that the energy would be curtailed otherwise? Not sure how to know that though...