8 ms·

Electricity = keeps you warm, cooks your food, powers your devices. Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
- 0des 5y ago
  My heater doesn't become less effective each year, requiring replacement. While ASIC concretely implies this, GPU is not excluded if you want to remain competitive (read: generating profit)
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    It doesn't have to be competitive. 4+ kWh electric showers are ubiquitous in my country. Literally a dumb piece of metal resistance immersed in water. Anything is better than the current situation. What if it was a processor instead? What if a bunch of home servers could heat up stored water through their heat instead of just dissipating that energy uselessly into the air? We'd be getting the heat we need and we'd be helping build a decentralized cash network. We were gonna spend energy heating up stuff anyway. Might as well get some cryptocurrency out of that heat.
    - thinkmassive 5y ago
      This is what WiseMining.io is addressing with their Sato “bitcoin boiler.” It uses hashcards (daughterboards populated with mining ASICs) immersed in coolant to augment a typical heat pump setup.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        That's interesting. My search for products in this category turned up the Qarnot company which also has a "digital boiler". Apparently, it's a general purpose Linux server that can be used to mine any coin or perform any type of computation. https://qarnot.com/en/heating-water/ https://qarnot.com/en/heating-water/ Not sure if it's even available outside Europe. I wonder if it's possible to somehow replicate this with a home server. How is it pumping the heat out of the components and into the water system?
    - bserge 5y ago
      A datacenter that doubles as district heating seems like a pretty good idea.
  - rlpb 5y ago
    You might say that a regular electric heater is 100% efficient, converting every unit of electricity into exactly one unit of equivalent heat. Crypto mining hardware is >100% efficient, as it's exactly as efficient as an electric heater, but also generates revenue. Over time, others make more efficient crypto mining hardware, reducing the yield from yours. This causes your "efficiency" to gradually reduce down to 100%, but no lower. However, nowadays we have heat pumps, which are also more efficient than our 100% benchmark, and produce additional useful heat.
    - hvis 5y ago
      > Crypto mining hardware is >100% efficient It also makes the hardware depreciate (simply with the passage of time, but also because of the particular usage), which in practice effects the balance and can easily turn the monetary efficiency into negative.
- likpok 5y ago
  Crypto miners are pretty inefficient at heating your home. A heat pump is more than twice as efficient as direct heat.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Can you elaborate? I've seen products that do this, it must be possible.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      Resistive heaters use energy to create heat. Heat pumps use energy to move heat. For a resistive heater, its taking 1 energy unit from the wall and putting 1 energy unit into the air. A heat pump will use one unit of energy from the wall to take 3-5 units of energy from one side of the system and dump that 3-5 units of energy to the other side of the system.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        I see. Heat pumps must move existing heat from somewhere though. Won't those come from burning fuels? I have a lot of solar panels in my home. I'm generating more energy than I'm using. I don't consider efficiency to be a significant concern at the moment.
        progval 5y ago
        It moves existing heat from the outside to the inside of the house. It works exactly like an air conditioner, but in the other direction. (And some heat pumps are reversible so they can be used as both)
        vel0city 5y ago
        There's plenty of available heat outside, even when its somewhat cold outside. This breaks down when it gets really cold, like arctic kind of cold, but most places where lots of people live don't get that cold for very long. Its the same principle as how even when its hot outside your AC unit can still manage to dump some heat out there. Its because of the latent heat of the refrigerant and the phase change induced by the changes in pressure from the compressor. Its kind of hacking the physics of phase changes to move energy from one place to another.
- vel0city 5y ago
  If you're using resistive heating, a computer is about as efficient as a space heater. I have not recently done the math, but I'm pretty sure in my area its still more economically efficient to heat my home with natural gas than resistive heat. Obviously, emissions are a concern, future price uncertainty of fossil fuels, etc. Not the best way forward. However, heat pumps in my area can make a ton of sense. They're far more efficient than resistive heating as long as it doesn't get practically arctic cold outside. When in decent climates they're about as economically efficient than a gas furnace. In other words, mining crypto for heat isn't necessarily the most economical thing to do. It may just be better for you to use a heat pump and put your savings into buying crypto if ultimately having crypto and being warm is your goal.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > I have not recently done the math What calculations are these? How do I figure out if it's worth it?
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      Pretty easy. Electric heat is 100% efficient. Natural gas is anywhere between 80-97% efficient depending on your model of furnace. Convert therms of gas[0] and kWh[1] to BTUs, and multiply by efficiency and price to determine which is cheapest[2]. Usually natural gas wins. For emissions it’s more complicated. You need to look up the energy source for your grid[3], it will vary a bit seasonally, and factor in transmission losses for electric heat. You can then calculate the emissions per BTU of natural gas heat vs. the emissions of the grid to give you a BTU of electric heat. For most grids, natural gas still wins. Where this gets complicated is if you use a heat pump, either a “mini split” (common in Europe and some new apartments) or a ground source (“geothermal”) heat pump. These have a seasonally adjusted efficiency rating[4], usually between 2 and 4. This means per unit of electrical energy the unit is moving 2-4 units of heat (depending on model and exterior conditions). You can take the electric heating number from above and divide by this number to figure out the cost and emissions for a heat pump. Usually a heat pump will win on emissions and lose on price (including installation costs) because natural gas is very very cheap. 0 - A “therm” of gas is the traditional measuring and billing unit of natural gas in the United States, it’s equivalent to roughly 100,000 BTUs. Your bill will probably be in therms, but cubic feet are trivially convertible to BTUs too. 1 - 1 kWh is 3,412 BTUs 2 - You can either compare per BTU costs, or your estimated monthly cost based on your heating need. The latter is important if you have tiered or seasonal electricity pricing. To figure this out take a sample monthly gas bill from winter, subtract your summer gas bill (if you have gas hot water) and use the calculations above to determine your heating needs in BTUs. This lets you calculate your electricity needs in kWh and therefore costs. 3 - It’s important that this is a seasonally correct. Most grids get dirtier as more polluting and less efficient power plants are turned on for summer AC, often coal power plants in most regions. Therefore the emissions per kWh will vary on a month by month basis for a given grid. 4 - If we’re being very precise, a non seasonally adjusted number would be best here. An air sourde Heat pump will struggle to extract heat from very cold exterior air, reducing its efficiency. A ground source one will be more efficient, given that ground water is warmer than the air typically.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that? Realistically? Cost. If your goal is to heat a space, it's much cheaper and more reliable to NOT use thousands of dollars of silicon. Doing calculations based on the site below, you might be able to heat a smallish bedroom with a very beefy PC. I can get a space heater that puts out that much heat for less than $50 and is far less likely to stop working (e.g. heatsink gets clogged and system overheats). https://www.stelpro.com/en/expert-advices/calculating-the-right-wattage-for-a-room https://www.stelpro.com/en/expert-advices/calculating-the-ri...
  - adflux 5y ago
    I already have an rtx gpu. It nets about 8$ of eth a day. Uses 250w. So that's around 1$ of power a day. And enough wattage to heat my office. So I can get paid to keep my room at a nice temperature. This is why I mine now
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > I already have an rtx gpu. It nets about 8$ of eth a day. Uses 250w. So that's around 1$ of power a day. And enough wattage to heat my office. So I can get paid to keep my room at a nice temperature. This is why I mine now Unless your office is the size of a closet, that doesn't sound like it's enough to provide all of its heating needs (at least according to the formula of the website I linked). It's certainly practical to provide to exploit heat generated by computers to partially heat a space, but I don't think it's practical to use silicon as the main heat source.
    - soheil 5y ago
      Using adsorption chillers [0] you can use the heat to also cool down your office. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/03/30/196054/using-heat-to-cool-buildings/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/03/30/196054/using-hea...
  - gambiting 5y ago
    I mean, you laugh, but during winter in my office at home whenever I get cold I just start running Folding@Home on my pc, it helps cure cancer and keeps me nice and warm. As far as I can tell it's cheaper than turning the heating on in the whole house too.
- throwaway946513 5y ago
  There was a video I've seen someone, a year ago, setup a 'pre-heater' for their home heating system with a mining rig, so that the home heater doesn't have to use nearly as much fuel/electricity to warm the home. I forget how efficient it was, but the summary was that the net decrease in cost to run the heater was observable but not significant enough to justify everyone doing so.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    That sounds freaking awesome. Do you know how to find it? I found a company called Qarnot that's offering products along those lines but they're probably extremely expensive. A home project would be ideal.
    - throwaway946513 5y ago
      While I don't remember which video it was - I think this is a pretty close estimate to it[0]. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLO73bbIJtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLO73bbIJtU The premise was to only operate the miner in cold months, when the outside air could easily cool the system. I didn't fully re-watch this video but it does give a good setup and explanation for it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sharperguy 5y ago
Miners are already looking into new business models which could actually improve the financial viability of green energy production, possibly driving down energy prices, rather than driving them up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2021/08/02/green-bitcoin-mining-the-big-profits-in-clean-crypto/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2021/08/02/gr...
trixie_ 5y ago
Technically if all electric space heaters were crypto miners as well then crytpo mining would be well distributed, resistant to attack and unprofitable to mine - win, win, win. Edit: Looks like matheusmoreira below doesn’t understand a 500w electric heater and a 500w crypto miner produce the same amount of heat and use the same amount of electricity.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Exactly! This sounds like the perfect way to create a distributed proof-of-work network.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    More like Proof-Of-Waste, both of precious electricity, and of precious rare earth elements and other materials. Not to mention how much precious time cryptocurrency shills waste, and dangerous greenhouse gasses they produce from all the hot air of their rancid breath, by droning on and on and on about cryptocurrency all the time, parroting all the lies they heard in youtube get-rich-quick pyramid scheme videos. Another shill in this thread just mindlessly repeated the same old lie they parrot all the time: >Crypto helps accelerate the growth, demand, and build-out of renewable energy. That's like saying using more Cocaine helps you quit using Cocaine faster. "Cocaine makes me feel like a new man. And he wants some too!" In an unfortunate and unintended way, it's true... And the absurd idea of using a crypto rig as a space heater has already been completely debunked in this thread. Go back and read it. If it's such a great idea, then why doesn't everybody already have one or a hundred of them, huh? matheusmoreira: Do you really believe in get-rich-quick schemes and perpetual motion devices and miracle cures, even when you can't seem to find any for sale that actually work? Then you must not believe in the free market, either. Is it easier to believe there's a huge well organized conspiracy suppressing these technologies, instead of simply the laws of physics and economics? Go back and read astoor's comment again, which trixie_'s fancifully wishful reply simply doesn't refute. But of course you can't argue facts with a true believer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095560 >Theoretically if every space heater right now was also a crypto miner, it would make any dedicated mining operation completely unprofitable. If your grandmother had wheels, then she'd be a bicycle. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=If%20my%20grandma%20had%20wheels https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=If%20my%20gr... >Sir, this is a casino. Please direct your anger towards Wall Street. POS = Proof of Shock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
ineedasername 5y ago
Easy solution: Mining generates heat to keep you warm and cook your food. A peltier setup turns some of it into electricity to power stuff. #rocket #diamondhands /s
azth 5y ago
> Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another. All crypto currencies are used for gambling? Can you give us a good solution to hedge against government induced inflation that does not involve usury or having enough cash to purchase property outright to rent it out? Note: almost all companies deal with interest in some way or another, even if they don't need to, so usury is embedded in their stocks.
- honkycat 5y ago
  Can you give us a good solution to keep the price of bread from rising above the ability for impoverished people to purchase it over government induced inflation? Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" while plugging their ears when people talk about subsidies for the gas, meat, defense, and other "profitable" industries.
  - azth 5y ago
    > Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" I don't believe in absolute free market as defined by capitalism. Case in point: I do not deal with interest (usury), as it is prohibited in my faith. There are also some other red lines which I will not get into here, as it is not the subject of discussion. I'm happy to go into them more though if someone is curious. As such, no, it is not your typical capitalistic position. > Can you give us a good solution to keep the price of bread from rising above the ability for impoverished people to purchase it over government induced inflation? Yes. In Islam, we have something called Zakat, a form of "wealth tax" if you will. Its proceedings go to impoverished people, among others. It has been documented that in Iraq during the Ummayad period, there were no poor people left to even accept Zakat, after everyone was paying their share. Of course we still need to handle the root cause: move to a currency that is not bound to interest that keeps growing, and the government can print money at will, devaluing everyone's hard work in an instant.
    - honkycat 5y ago
      Interesting! I didn't know about Zakat and Islams relation to usury. Thank you for educating me!

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?

0des 5y ago
My heater doesn't become less effective each year, requiring replacement. While ASIC concretely implies this, GPU is not excluded if you want to remain competitive (read: generating profit)
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  It doesn't have to be competitive. 4+ kWh electric showers are ubiquitous in my country. Literally a dumb piece of metal resistance immersed in water. Anything is better than the current situation. What if it was a processor instead? What if a bunch of home servers could heat up stored water through their heat instead of just dissipating that energy uselessly into the air? We'd be getting the heat we need and we'd be helping build a decentralized cash network. We were gonna spend energy heating up stuff anyway. Might as well get some cryptocurrency out of that heat.
  - thinkmassive 5y ago
    This is what WiseMining.io is addressing with their Sato “bitcoin boiler.” It uses hashcards (daughterboards populated with mining ASICs) immersed in coolant to augment a typical heat pump setup.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      That's interesting. My search for products in this category turned up the Qarnot company which also has a "digital boiler". Apparently, it's a general purpose Linux server that can be used to mine any coin or perform any type of computation. https://qarnot.com/en/heating-water/ https://qarnot.com/en/heating-water/ Not sure if it's even available outside Europe. I wonder if it's possible to somehow replicate this with a home server. How is it pumping the heat out of the components and into the water system?
  - bserge 5y ago
    A datacenter that doubles as district heating seems like a pretty good idea.
- rlpb 5y ago
  You might say that a regular electric heater is 100% efficient, converting every unit of electricity into exactly one unit of equivalent heat. Crypto mining hardware is >100% efficient, as it's exactly as efficient as an electric heater, but also generates revenue. Over time, others make more efficient crypto mining hardware, reducing the yield from yours. This causes your "efficiency" to gradually reduce down to 100%, but no lower. However, nowadays we have heat pumps, which are also more efficient than our 100% benchmark, and produce additional useful heat.
  - hvis 5y ago
    > Crypto mining hardware is >100% efficient It also makes the hardware depreciate (simply with the passage of time, but also because of the particular usage), which in practice effects the balance and can easily turn the monetary efficiency into negative.
likpok 5y ago
Crypto miners are pretty inefficient at heating your home. A heat pump is more than twice as efficient as direct heat.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Can you elaborate? I've seen products that do this, it must be possible.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Resistive heaters use energy to create heat. Heat pumps use energy to move heat. For a resistive heater, its taking 1 energy unit from the wall and putting 1 energy unit into the air. A heat pump will use one unit of energy from the wall to take 3-5 units of energy from one side of the system and dump that 3-5 units of energy to the other side of the system.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      I see. Heat pumps must move existing heat from somewhere though. Won't those come from burning fuels? I have a lot of solar panels in my home. I'm generating more energy than I'm using. I don't consider efficiency to be a significant concern at the moment.
      - progval 5y ago
        It moves existing heat from the outside to the inside of the house. It works exactly like an air conditioner, but in the other direction. (And some heat pumps are reversible so they can be used as both)
      - vel0city 5y ago
        There's plenty of available heat outside, even when its somewhat cold outside. This breaks down when it gets really cold, like arctic kind of cold, but most places where lots of people live don't get that cold for very long. Its the same principle as how even when its hot outside your AC unit can still manage to dump some heat out there. Its because of the latent heat of the refrigerant and the phase change induced by the changes in pressure from the compressor. Its kind of hacking the physics of phase changes to move energy from one place to another.
vel0city 5y ago
If you're using resistive heating, a computer is about as efficient as a space heater. I have not recently done the math, but I'm pretty sure in my area its still more economically efficient to heat my home with natural gas than resistive heat. Obviously, emissions are a concern, future price uncertainty of fossil fuels, etc. Not the best way forward. However, heat pumps in my area can make a ton of sense. They're far more efficient than resistive heating as long as it doesn't get practically arctic cold outside. When in decent climates they're about as economically efficient than a gas furnace. In other words, mining crypto for heat isn't necessarily the most economical thing to do. It may just be better for you to use a heat pump and put your savings into buying crypto if ultimately having crypto and being warm is your goal.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > I have not recently done the math What calculations are these? How do I figure out if it's worth it?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Pretty easy. Electric heat is 100% efficient. Natural gas is anywhere between 80-97% efficient depending on your model of furnace. Convert therms of gas[0] and kWh[1] to BTUs, and multiply by efficiency and price to determine which is cheapest[2]. Usually natural gas wins. For emissions it’s more complicated. You need to look up the energy source for your grid[3], it will vary a bit seasonally, and factor in transmission losses for electric heat. You can then calculate the emissions per BTU of natural gas heat vs. the emissions of the grid to give you a BTU of electric heat. For most grids, natural gas still wins. Where this gets complicated is if you use a heat pump, either a “mini split” (common in Europe and some new apartments) or a ground source (“geothermal”) heat pump. These have a seasonally adjusted efficiency rating[4], usually between 2 and 4. This means per unit of electrical energy the unit is moving 2-4 units of heat (depending on model and exterior conditions). You can take the electric heating number from above and divide by this number to figure out the cost and emissions for a heat pump. Usually a heat pump will win on emissions and lose on price (including installation costs) because natural gas is very very cheap. 0 - A “therm” of gas is the traditional measuring and billing unit of natural gas in the United States, it’s equivalent to roughly 100,000 BTUs. Your bill will probably be in therms, but cubic feet are trivially convertible to BTUs too. 1 - 1 kWh is 3,412 BTUs 2 - You can either compare per BTU costs, or your estimated monthly cost based on your heating need. The latter is important if you have tiered or seasonal electricity pricing. To figure this out take a sample monthly gas bill from winter, subtract your summer gas bill (if you have gas hot water) and use the calculations above to determine your heating needs in BTUs. This lets you calculate your electricity needs in kWh and therefore costs. 3 - It’s important that this is a seasonally correct. Most grids get dirtier as more polluting and less efficient power plants are turned on for summer AC, often coal power plants in most regions. Therefore the emissions per kWh will vary on a month by month basis for a given grid. 4 - If we’re being very precise, a non seasonally adjusted number would be best here. An air sourde Heat pump will struggle to extract heat from very cold exterior air, reducing its efficiency. A ground source one will be more efficient, given that ground water is warmer than the air typically.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that? Realistically? Cost. If your goal is to heat a space, it's much cheaper and more reliable to NOT use thousands of dollars of silicon. Doing calculations based on the site below, you might be able to heat a smallish bedroom with a very beefy PC. I can get a space heater that puts out that much heat for less than $50 and is far less likely to stop working (e.g. heatsink gets clogged and system overheats). https://www.stelpro.com/en/expert-advices/calculating-the-right-wattage-for-a-room https://www.stelpro.com/en/expert-advices/calculating-the-ri...
- adflux 5y ago
  I already have an rtx gpu. It nets about 8$ of eth a day. Uses 250w. So that's around 1$ of power a day. And enough wattage to heat my office. So I can get paid to keep my room at a nice temperature. This is why I mine now
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I already have an rtx gpu. It nets about 8$ of eth a day. Uses 250w. So that's around 1$ of power a day. And enough wattage to heat my office. So I can get paid to keep my room at a nice temperature. This is why I mine now Unless your office is the size of a closet, that doesn't sound like it's enough to provide all of its heating needs (at least according to the formula of the website I linked). It's certainly practical to provide to exploit heat generated by computers to partially heat a space, but I don't think it's practical to use silicon as the main heat source.
  - soheil 5y ago
    Using adsorption chillers [0] you can use the heat to also cool down your office. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/03/30/196054/using-heat-to-cool-buildings/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/03/30/196054/using-hea...
- gambiting 5y ago
  I mean, you laugh, but during winter in my office at home whenever I get cold I just start running Folding@Home on my pc, it helps cure cancer and keeps me nice and warm. As far as I can tell it's cheaper than turning the heating on in the whole house too.
throwaway946513 5y ago
There was a video I've seen someone, a year ago, setup a 'pre-heater' for their home heating system with a mining rig, so that the home heater doesn't have to use nearly as much fuel/electricity to warm the home. I forget how efficient it was, but the summary was that the net decrease in cost to run the heater was observable but not significant enough to justify everyone doing so.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  That sounds freaking awesome. Do you know how to find it? I found a company called Qarnot that's offering products along those lines but they're probably extremely expensive. A home project would be ideal.
  - throwaway946513 5y ago
    While I don't remember which video it was - I think this is a pretty close estimate to it[0]. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLO73bbIJtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLO73bbIJtU The premise was to only operate the miner in cold months, when the outside air could easily cool the system. I didn't fully re-watch this video but it does give a good setup and explanation for it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sharperguy 5y ago

Miners are already looking into new business models which could actually improve the financial viability of green energy production, possibly driving down energy prices, rather than driving them up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2021/08/02/green-bitcoin-mining-the-big-profits-in-clean-crypto/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2021/08/02/gr...

trixie_ 5y ago

Technically if all electric space heaters were crypto miners as well then crytpo mining would be well distributed, resistant to attack and unprofitable to mine - win, win, win. Edit: Looks like matheusmoreira below doesn’t understand a 500w electric heater and a 500w crypto miner produce the same amount of heat and use the same amount of electricity.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Exactly! This sounds like the perfect way to create a distributed proof-of-work network.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  More like Proof-Of-Waste, both of precious electricity, and of precious rare earth elements and other materials. Not to mention how much precious time cryptocurrency shills waste, and dangerous greenhouse gasses they produce from all the hot air of their rancid breath, by droning on and on and on about cryptocurrency all the time, parroting all the lies they heard in youtube get-rich-quick pyramid scheme videos. Another shill in this thread just mindlessly repeated the same old lie they parrot all the time: >Crypto helps accelerate the growth, demand, and build-out of renewable energy. That's like saying using more Cocaine helps you quit using Cocaine faster. "Cocaine makes me feel like a new man. And he wants some too!" In an unfortunate and unintended way, it's true... And the absurd idea of using a crypto rig as a space heater has already been completely debunked in this thread. Go back and read it. If it's such a great idea, then why doesn't everybody already have one or a hundred of them, huh? matheusmoreira: Do you really believe in get-rich-quick schemes and perpetual motion devices and miracle cures, even when you can't seem to find any for sale that actually work? Then you must not believe in the free market, either. Is it easier to believe there's a huge well organized conspiracy suppressing these technologies, instead of simply the laws of physics and economics? Go back and read astoor's comment again, which trixie_'s fancifully wishful reply simply doesn't refute. But of course you can't argue facts with a true believer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095560 >Theoretically if every space heater right now was also a crypto miner, it would make any dedicated mining operation completely unprofitable. If your grandmother had wheels, then she'd be a bicycle. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=If%20my%20grandma%20had%20wheels https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=If%20my%20gr... >Sir, this is a casino. Please direct your anger towards Wall Street. POS = Proof of Shock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME

ineedasername 5y ago

Easy solution: Mining generates heat to keep you warm and cook your food. A peltier setup turns some of it into electricity to power stuff. #rocket #diamondhands /s

azth 5y ago

> Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another. All crypto currencies are used for gambling? Can you give us a good solution to hedge against government induced inflation that does not involve usury or having enough cash to purchase property outright to rent it out? Note: almost all companies deal with interest in some way or another, even if they don't need to, so usury is embedded in their stocks.

honkycat 5y ago
Can you give us a good solution to keep the price of bread from rising above the ability for impoverished people to purchase it over government induced inflation? Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" while plugging their ears when people talk about subsidies for the gas, meat, defense, and other "profitable" industries.
- azth 5y ago
  > Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" I don't believe in absolute free market as defined by capitalism. Case in point: I do not deal with interest (usury), as it is prohibited in my faith. There are also some other red lines which I will not get into here, as it is not the subject of discussion. I'm happy to go into them more though if someone is curious. As such, no, it is not your typical capitalistic position. > Can you give us a good solution to keep the price of bread from rising above the ability for impoverished people to purchase it over government induced inflation? Yes. In Islam, we have something called Zakat, a form of "wealth tax" if you will. Its proceedings go to impoverished people, among others. It has been documented that in Iraq during the Ummayad period, there were no poor people left to even accept Zakat, after everyone was paying their share. Of course we still need to handle the root cause: move to a currency that is not bound to interest that keeps growing, and the government can print money at will, devaluing everyone's hard work in an instant.
  - honkycat 5y ago
    Interesting! I didn't know about Zakat and Islams relation to usury. Thank you for educating me!