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There was a startup somewhere trying to sell Bitcoin miners as home heating units in cold climates, but the economics don't work since the chips are too expensi
by api 5y ago
There was a startup somewhere trying to sell Bitcoin miners as home heating units in cold climates, but the economics don't work since the chips are too expensive and gas is also still too much less expensive than electricity to heat with.
Most industrial processes require heat beyond what a mining chip could handle... unless you fabricated special mining chips out of different semiconductor materials that can handle high heat. But that's probably too expensive for the economics to work too.
What would make some sense to me is an integrated solar PV panel / mining unit. Just deploy them in the desert and connect them. Each panel could be discrete and WiFi connected, meaning you would not have to wire them to anything at all. Just prop them up in the sun with WAPs every so often to connect them to a network.
- mdale 5y agoExcept in 2 years they would be obsolete because of wear and tear and or because a new node process is released and or we get more clever around specialized chips for this purpose. More and more parts of the economy are mapped into this work relative to the scarcity of these bits of value. Bitcoin is 0.5% today of global energy usage a few more multiples and it's going to much more directly tie global energy costs to the price fluctuations the currency. We risk the whole world becoming paperclips type economics doomsday scenario.. least growing number of people that ascribe value to cryto agree to collectively ascribe to an alternative model for distribution of transaction security.
- giuliomagnifico 5y agoThis one is the startup you mean (I think): https://bitcoinminingheater.com/ https://bitcoinminingheater.com/