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.

Comments

Efficient

[burtosis]

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.

Re:Efficient

[ZorinLynx]

Only relatively warm climates use electricity for heating because the cost is just too high once you have to run the heat more than a few weeks out of the year.

That said, if you're going to mine anyway, might as well do it in the winter as the heat produced will be useful instead of wasted. It's definitely not "free heat" if you normally use gas or oil to heat your home, though.

What's the power consumption

[guruevi]

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.

Re: Trifecta!

[Wycliffe]

The point of something like this is that if you need to heat your house anyways then the electricity is basically free and you can reach break even much sooner.