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Bitcoin Mining Heats Home For Free In Siberia (qz.com)
Quartz has published a video on YouTube about two entrepreneurs who have figured out how to heat their homes for free by mining bitcoin. The "miner" -- that is, the machine mining the bitcoins -- warms up liquid that is then transferred to the underfloor heating system. The cottage has two miners, which bring in about $430 per month from processing bitcoin transactions -- all while keeping the 20 square meter space warm.
Are they the same? I'll be honest, I know little about bitcoins. But it seems to me the money isn't actually coming from the mining?
just like growing weed indoors
Ehh, maybe it is. I don't exactly go to eastern Europe to often, so I don't exactly know. But it seems like someone really isn't thinking this headline thorough and instead were just looking for headline.
If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs. Running 19 GPUs is enough to burn down a shack.
... no longer pays for the electricity bill?
Seriously... no it's not free. He's paying for the electricity consumed by the processors performing bitcoin mining which create heat.
Siberian miners mining to keep warm while not mining.
No, the will use vodka to keep warm. With bears.
Right, obviously no one who could rig their house to be heated with bitcoin miners could possibly have another heating system or figure something else out. A very intelligent observation.
I think everyone who ever tried a bit of mining with any enthusiasm found their home a little warmer. 4 Gpus running flat out all day will keep a room warm. I heard some good stories about the uses for this heat a few years ago, but one guy on a forum I remember who tried to run a fairly large operation with several dozen gpus in his basement. He was using the heat produced to keep his house warm, but his method for redistributing the heat throughout the property was just to leave all the doors open. He was experiencing psu/gpu failures daily due to the temperature down there, which he said was so hot he could only go in for a few minutes at a time. Everyone was telling him he had to force some cool air in from outdoors and do something to move the hot air out, the whole time he was just cursing yet another hardware failure and not doing anything about the problem. He didn't even have any large fans anywhere in his basement to move the bulk of the air around, just the dozens of little fans whining away on the gpus, power supplies and cpus as they each slowly died from heat stroke.
- growing pot (illegal in some areas and consumption or IR dwelling image can be cause for ....)
- bitcoin mining - just creates more costs as profit as it seems:
https://www.buybitcoinworldwid...
> While mining is still technically possible for anyone, those with underpowered setups will find more money is spent on electricity than is generated through mining.
My apartment is being heated by 3x RX580's and my shop is being heat by 4 large mining rigs. Since I have to pay electric heat anyway, I might as well get some money out of it.
The story offered no detail at all, really - but maybe you can speak to your setup with regards to these significant, unanswered questions:
- Are those rigs the *only* source of heat in your apartment and shop?
- If so, how warm do they keep those spaces during mid-winter?
- What was your mid-winter electricity bill before you did this, and what is it now?
- How much income per month are you getting from the bitcoin mining?
And, for a rather important comparison with the story... where do you live?
#DeleteChrome
What rig X 2 do you need to earn $430 mining bitcoin?
This guy did the same thing in 2011:
https://bitcointalk.org/index....
I'd much rather dump heat into my house with 3D printers than bitcoin miners. If your electricity is cheap enough, sure, you are effectively heating your house for free but, you've still paid for the miners and they will be obsolete in 6 months (Actually, they are usually obsolete by the time China ships them to you). After a single winter you are going to have a pile of very hot, very expensive ASICs that no longer mine fast enough to pay for their electricity costs.
A 3D printer is presumably creating something you want so the heat is a beneficial winter-time byproduct. I have two in my home office. It's currently snowing outside and I have my thermostat set at 62F. The rest of the house is a bit cold but, they keep a 12ft x 12ft office nice and cozy and every few hours something interesting pops out of them. I didn't buy them to heat my office but, I suspect that my electric bill will be lower this winter because I'm basically just heating the room I'm usually sitting in.
Those evil Russians are at it again. This time their nefarious plot is to mine all the Bitcoin in the world and use it built a gigantic Rock Monster with which to destroy the whole world!
I wonder if it would be possible to cross this software with something like boinc so that all that cpu time is spent crunching data instead of creating useless numbers. I don't know what I'm talking about either so.. but it seems like a lot of waste.
For purposes of initially deciding whether this might make any sense for you, there is one big question: do you have to use electric heating? Pretty much any other common type of heating is better.
IF you have to use electric heating there is basically no such thing as "efficient" electric heating and "inefficient". As long as you are heating the rooms you want to heat, you're perfectly efficient, more or less. ("Waste" from any sort of inefficient system ends up as heat. Since heat it what you want, it's 100% efficient.)
Since your electric furnace will be no more efficient than a mining rig, you may as well use that electricity do something while it's making heat. Maybe a mining rig. It won't useany more electricity. Just throttle it down if it produces more heat than you need.
Since electricity costs are equal with any kind of electric heat, it then comes down to the cost of buying the hardware. See if the hardware you're looking at will produce enough junkcoin to pay for itself in one winter.
If you think this is a great deal, be aware that this mentions heating a 20 square cottage. That is equivalent to heating about 2/3 of my modest home's living room only. In American terms, that's like 215 square feet - not a lot.
And, of course, if you are considering jumping into the mining game now, you need to do some calculations to figure out when you might break even and maybe begin to profit on your investment. Bitcoin mining hardware is not cheap, it isn't usable for much else (other than heating), the difficulty of mining will continue to rise over time (read: the number of BTC you will mine will go down, and hardware becomes less effective), your electricity cost is a factor, and then there's the whole notion of cryptocurrencies possibly being a big bubble.
You should definitely think about harvesting the waste heat if you are a miner, but individuals may have missed the boat at this point.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
*Gasp* You're right! Depending on Bitcoin's price they may be facing a future where their heating is not entirely free! There only options would be to pay for heating or freeze and, obviously, paying for heating is out of the question.
Is there nothing we can do to help these people?
They're probably already dead.
It is like saying free health care in Canada. Yea, you don't pay any direct cost for heating the house, but you still pay for the power that the computers use. Could say it is more expensive to heat the house using the computers then with a normal way, if not for the bitcoins.
This is not free heat. The ones paying for the heat are mostly fools and criminals. "And some, I assume, are good people."
If theyre gay you can count on it.
Why arent we bestfriends with Russia again??
After that it was SETI
These days it's running computers for BOINC which now comes along with gridcoins.
Yes I am still paying for the electricity, but it is doing something useful for me in addition to heat.
I do this here, minus the air/water heat exchange.
Selling 1kW of GPU easily covers ~$0.12/kWh. This is a decent chunk of my heating budget. I heat with electric, so I'm burning the electrons anyway - might as well make them do some productive work before they return to ground potential.
If trends continue I'll add another 500-750W of cards.
The mining and profit covered my heating bill for last winter. It isn't making money, per se, but losing less.
..don't panic
Whoa, sounds like Bitcoin is the "real deal"! Guess I'd better get on the Bitcoin bandwagon! I am a real person and not pumping Bitcoin!
Heating 20 square feet, that is not exactly heating their home/cottage.
So, so both of these people live in this cabin? Is there a kitchenette, let alone a toilet?
If you have to go outside to do your business, kind of lose all that warmth you were enjoying. Of course, $430 a month is a lot of beer money.
Siberia average annual temperature is -5C. Perhaps more than slightly cooler?