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Qarnot Unveils a Cryptocurrency Heater For Your Home (techcrunch.com)
Qarnot, the French startup known for using Ryzen Pro processors to heat homes and offices for free, is unveiling a new computing heater specifically made for cryptocurrency mining. "The QC1 is a heater for your home that features a passive computer inside," reports TechCrunch. "And this computer is optimized for mining." From the report: The QC1 features two AMD GPUs (Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX580 with 8GB of VRAM) and is designed to mine Ethers by default. You can set it up in a few minutes by plugging an Ethernet cable and putting your Ethereum wallet address in the mobile app. You'll then gradually receive ethers on this address -- Qarnot doesn't receive any coin, you keep 100 percent of your cryptocurrencies. If you believe Litecoin or another cryptocurrency is the future, you can also access the computer and mine another cryptocurrency. It's a Linux server and you can access it directly. If your home is cold and you desperately need to turn on the heaters, the QC1 is going to turn on the two GPUs and mine at a 60 MH/s speed. There are also traditional heating conductors in case those two GPUs are not enough. Qarnot heaters don't have any hard drive and rely on passive heating. You won't hear any fan buzzing in the background. You can order the QC1 for $3,600 starting today -- you can also pay in bitcoins. The company hopes to sell hundreds of QC1 in the next year.
too costly.
too unpredictable.
Well maybe you could use the GPU heat to drive a Sterling Engine, to turn a compressor, for some of that old fashion AC?
Warm your wallet, your heart, and your house, all at the same time!
...this whole crypto-currency thing is turning into.
I wonder if, when we discover advanced alien-life, they'll have Dyson Sphere's purely to power their damned blockchains.
The most interesting use of processing power for mining a cryptocoin I've heard of is Render Token. Instead of trying to find an arbitrary hash, the processor renders 3d graphics as part of a cloud-computing job. Thus, useful work is accomplished. However, I'm unsure why the cryptocoin angle is necessary when it could be given a standard monetary reward. Presumably each frame rendered has to be verified by another worker to ensure you didn't cheat in the rendering, and the contents of the scene/render wouldn't be secret, so it won't be anything particularly sensitive.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Years from now - many years - folks are going to be talking about the cryptocurrency craze and how a very very small minority of people got rich while everyone else lost everything.
It'll be mentioned along with the tulip bulb craze and the stock markets of the 1920 and 1990s and the real estate market of the 00s.
For the minority of people who use electricity to warm thier houses in cold climates it may make sense as it's just run through a fancy resistor. Than again any mining rig would do the same, so I'm not sure what the real benefit is other than maybe aesthetics.
*snicker*
To know whether "$3600 + electric bill + BitCoin-conversion" (assuming this is only good for the winter months of 1, maybe 2 years) is better than just heating your house with gas or a heat pump we need to know what the consumption and bitcoin generation speeds.
My heating costs are about 3c/kWh and BTC is not worth my investment of time and money, but I know most people use gas or electric at much higher rates. Unless this optimized the rate of production, not sure if it's worth.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I don't see how a passive computer could heat your house. I'd suggest using an active computer.
0x or or snor perron?!
Many utility stocks yield in the 4 to 5% range. At 5% yield, a $4000 purchase of shares yields $200/yr. Depending on your rates, this might be close to paying for what a cheap $100 resistance heater would consume, or it might not. YMMV depending on how often you use such things.
Of course stocks aren't risk-free; but you don't even have to chose your local utility--you can evaluate your appetite for risk in the market. I think in most cases, a good utility stock is far more likely to hold value than this thing. Even a utility with aging plants isn't going to become obsolete anywhere near as fast as a mining rig.
If you don't like finance, you can always put the money towards a solar install if you're setup for that to work. The beauty of the financial approach is that you can do it anywhere--even in an apartment.
Long story short, I can think of many better ways to deploy that cash for the purpose of paying utility bills.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Is it April 1st already?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I'm not fat.
Talk about presumptuous!
Never happened. True story.
I must be an illusion, then.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
$3,600 for ~$1k in GPUs and ~$300 in other hardware. Am I missing something?
Someone will hack it and heat you to death on a sunny summer day.
Heaters usually last for decades.
Crypto mining hardware is usually obsolete within a year.
See the problem?
Tom Geller
So the difference between this device, and a regular old cryptocurrency mining rig is ... ?