I've thought through this idea a few times (cloud processing in people's homes for heating). It's pretty hard to make the economics work out. You can bring down

I've thought through this idea a few times (cloud processing in people's homes for heating). It's pretty hard to make the economics work out. You can bring down hardware costs using older processor tech, which is ok since you don't care about efficiency. Alternately you put a shit ton of mobile phone processors on a board. You also need some really advanced software systems if you want to do any real processing and be robust to random failure of nodes. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm skeptical. Cryptomining doesn't seem like a sufficient return these days, and if you're using electricity over gas it's a total no-go. It's the sort of idea that my physics background loves (why the hell are we turning so much energy straight into entropy all the time instead of doing useful work first?) but pragmatically it doesn't seem to work out. As a side note, if you want to be fun at parties talk about your computer as your new 100% efficient space heater :)