7 ms·
"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... Tha
by theamk 10mo ago
"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet...
That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
- userbinator 10mo agoI wonder if there's enough heat being produced for it to act as a district heating plant.
- hephaes7us 10mo agoThere absolutely is, but of course it's nonzero cost to capture.
- adonovan 10mo agoAlso, the temperature is not high enough (compared to the steam coming out of a gas/oil/nuclear plant) to obtain much work from the waste heat.
- tonyarkles 10mo agoThat is 100% the issue. This is really low quality heat. Making it better would require even more energy input (e.g. a heat pump) because we can’t safely run electronics hot enough to generate high quality process heat.
- duskwuff 10mo agoRockdale is a small town of ~5000 residents. Even if it were practical to install district heating - which I don't think it is - there certainly isn't demand for hundreds of megawatts of it.
- timeon 10mo agoNot sure what your point is. With POW inefficiency is by design.
- edoceo 10mo agoYou got the point. It's "by design" - you've both said it.
- nh23423fefe 10mo agoa home can leak heat to the environment because of bad insulation. a datacenter doesn't leak heat because leaking is normatively bad.
- dangalf 10mo agoTechnically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
- geoffschmidt 10mo agoHeat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.
- anon84873628 10mo agoHow many computer things you got done per unit electricity, and how many mechanical things you do with the temperature gradient between the computer and its heat sync. For example, kinda wasteful to cook eggs with new electrons when you could use the computer heat to help you denature those proteins. Or just put the heat in human living spaces. (Putting aside how practical that actually is... Which it isn't)
- eimrine 10mo agoGood luck with collecting that heat from air.
- mr_toad 10mo agoThere’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
- RhysU 10mo agoIt'd be super fun to take that as an axiom of physics then to see how far upwards one could build from that. Above my skills by far.
- kelnos 10mo agoI would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose. It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity. (And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)
- stouset 10mo ago> wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work Even if turned into useful work, the end result of that work is still ultimately heat.
- cousin_it 10mo agoRight, but if it's noticeably hotter than the environment, then that temperature difference could be used to drive a heat engine and get some more useful work. So the knee-jerk response "omg, we see the heat from space? it's gotta be wasteful!" is kind of correct, in theory.
- anon84873628 10mo agoSome people are saying "waste heat" in the technical sense of "the heat my industrial process created and I need to get rid of" and others are saying "waste heat" as "heat humans are emitting into space without slapping at least one Carnot engine on it yet".
- stouset 10mo agoIf the heat being generated were economically worthwhile, the miners would be incentivized to use it to offset their costs. Since they aren't, we can somewhat reasonably assume that it would cost more to recapture than it's probably worth.
- tbrownaw 10mo ago
- EGreg 10mo agoSeriously, the only way I would accept Bitcoin mining is as a winter heating source that pays for itself. Why can't people sell those?
- wmf 10mo agoThose exist but they're too expensive to pay back their cost. And heat pumps are 3x the efficiency of resistive heating.
- anon84873628 10mo agoUnfortunately, Bitcoin mining is pretty hot as far as regular computer use goes, but not very hot at all compared to burning some fuel.
- yellowcake0 10mo agoThe economics of bitcoin mining dictate that the work must have no other utility. If you increase its profitability by using it for auxiliary winter heating, then more people will mine bitcoin until there is an oversupply of heating and we return to the current equilibrium amount of "wasted" heat.
- EGreg 10mo agoThis seems to indicate a serious misunderstanding of both bitcoin's economics as well as the feasibility of having an "oversupply of heating". Hundreds of millions to over a billion people globally lack reliable energy for lighting, heating, and cooking. And bitcoin's economics don't dictate that mining never have a side benefit.
- fainpul 10mo ago> By design, it's enormous electric heater. You're right, it's not leaking, it's dumping excess heat on purpose. However, I get triggered whenever someone uses the term "by design" wrongly. The generation of heat is not by design. It's an undesired side-effect of the computing being done. "By design" would mean that someone decided that there should be a certain amount of heat generation and made sure that it happens. Most often I see this term misuse from developers who explain bugs as being "by design". It happens when two features interact in an undesired way that creates problems (a bug). Developers like to look at feature A in isolation, determine that it works as designed, then look at feature B, determine that it also works as designed, then they look at and understand the interaction between feature A and B and since they now understand what is happening, they claim it's "by design". However, nobody ever decided that feature A and B should interact this way. It was clearly an oversight and every normal person would agree that the interaction is undesired and a bug. But the developer says "won't fix, this is by design". Infuriating!
- baruchel 10mo agoWhen you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.
- fainpul 10mo agoI'm not sure if you're trolling. Of course that's nonsense. The work is entirely the (artificially complex) computations necessary to get to the result. If someone were to invent a 100% efficient computer, based on superconductors, which produces no heat at all, the proof of work (the final hash value) would still be equally valid. As I said, heat is an undesired, unavoidable side-effect. You don't show anybody the heat you produced, to convince them that you did the work, you show them the hash value, otherwise you could just burn some wood.
- Lerc 10mo agoWell It it's using solar power it's just moving heat from one place to another. I guess, if it's using fossil fuel to generate power it's also just moving heat from one place to another, but really really slowly. The relevant factor there is that the long term storage was performing a important secondary function of holding a lot of co2. It's in Texas, surely that's an area amenable to solar production. What are they actually using there.
- akimbostrawman 10mo agothis obvious disingenuous framing is clearly on purpose to manipulate