@berkes lol I know you joke but there is a little bit of truth in that.

Did you know that when running a cryptominer in the winter in cold climates you effectively have 0 electricity costs for mining?

@freemo I was only partly joking.

When we put on the water-kettle, we turn electricity into heat. Why not make your kettle a tiny crypto-miner instead?

Slightly larger, is what Nerdalize was doing (they went bankrupt: typical startup-scaling-errors made). Not crypto-mining, but still anything that needed large FGPU farms could be ran on their fleet of heaters in people's houses and showers when those people needed heat.

@berkes yes i remember, it was a good idea in theory, though did have a few technical issues (low utilization of hardware means its harder to amortize costs).

The thing most people dont get is that a cryptominer is **as efficient** as an electric heater. People seem to think electric heaters are special or more efficient but the truth is anything that isnt radiating energy in a form like RF or light (which escapes outside the home) is going to be a 100% efficient heater.

In fact the very idea of just having a heater for your home that produces waste heat deliberately seems like a complete engineering fail in many ways.

@freemo This. Exactly.

Worst, the second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything creates "waste heat".

The fact that we don't distribute, or store this, is a serious oversight. Caused by the way-too-cheap energy, I guess.

But it does offer a chance: whenever we need heat, it can, in theory, be delivered to us, for free. From your car, a factory, a plant, datacenter, computers etc.

This, luckily, is happening more and more.

@berkes its hard to recover waste heat to useful purpose. It can be done to a certain extent. But I'm more concerned with the deliberate generation of waste heat than making it useful after the fact.

@freemo You are right, off course.

I did use my Butterfly Bitcoin Miner as a "coffee warmer" though :D A very noisy coffee-warmer, but it worked perfectly.

@berkes It can work to a point, but consider the effective result of that is reduced cooling to the miner and thus a reduction in its theoretical maximum mining rate.

The more efficient the cooling of the miner the less capable youd be to use the heat you pull away because to do so you have to spread it over a larger space.

For example if you had your coffee as a heat sink if the coffee were larger (and thus didnt heat up as much) you would have more effectively cooled the miner. But in turn would had a cup of coffee that was cold (or colder)