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Bitcoin Businesses Power The Almighty Buck

Bitcoin Mining Heats Home For Free In Siberia (qz.com) 106

Posted by BeauHD from the cottage-in-the-woods dept.
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.
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Bitcoin Mining Heats Home For Free In Siberia More

Bitcoin Mining Heats Home For Free In Siberia

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  • 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?

    • Re:Mining vs Transaction (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pfhorrest ( 545131 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @05:27PM (#55486393) Homepage Journal

      Pretty much yes. "Mining" bitcoin means doing the cryptographic work necessary to verify transactions, and that work is automatically rewarded by the system by the generation of new bitcoins for those who do the work.

      • Partly wrong.
        There is also a transaction fee, in existing bitcoins, that they will get from the transactors.
    • Yes, mining is brute forcing hashes to verify network transactions for a time, when a hash is deemed difficult enough the network releases a block but the difficulty automatically adjusts to the total mining power on the network so those blocks are released at a fixed rate. Along with the released blocks the miners get the transaction fees paid to give various transactions higher priority on the network. At some point when all the bitcoin blocks have been released those fees are meant to reward miners so th

      • I mean, it's kind of doing something. My bank doesn't need someone to burn tons of coal to keep track of my bank account. So it's also kind of doing nothing.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

          It's "doing nothing" the same way the Secret Service is "doing nothing" when the President is out in public. It's busy making sure something underhanded isn't happening.

          • You can pretty much guarantee one of the replies to this comment will give those Secret Service guys something to do.

        • Your bank can cook the ledgers if it wishes. There is no proof of work concept. Transactions can be doctored.

          • Has this happened in the last 100 years in the US?

            • Yes, constantly. Almost every major bank reorders transactions so that the highest value transactions occur first and the opposite is true of deposits which are applied after charges. This maximizes the chance for an overdraft and before occupy wallstreet and the banking reforms by Elizabeth Warren it maximized the number of transactions they could charge an OD fee on. Sometimes this could allow for charging five OD fees even though only one transaction of less than $1 was actually made with insufficient av
            • Actually the answer is irrelevant. Cryptocurrency and its decentralization is a new way of banking of the future where you don't have to trust any one entity. The computation of the nonce value implies one can't cook the books (that easily..nearly impossible). So it opens up new ways of doing transactions / way of life.
        • True, but your bank can also rip you off, give your money away at the request of a third party; such as a robber like a gunman, the IRS, or someone in response to a court order. Also your money could be fake, the transaction that funded your balance could have fraud at some point in the history and be reversed or someone could just say it was fraud, etc. You might agree some of those things would be just or for the communal good but ultimately it doesn't matter what you think, people have the power to take

          • Wait, aren't people losing their bitcoins on exchanges all the time? Are there stories like that about banks?

            • Exchanges are not part of the bitcoin system. Neither are tumblers, black markets, etc.

              But yes, people lose their money at banks ALL the time, it's happened to me and I'm sure it's happened to you at some point. It happens every time a bank charges a fee, pays out an electronic charge you didn't authorize, reverses a charge on a bounced check, holds/freezes funds on behalf of a government agency, pays out funds for identity theft, or issues loans because they come from newly created debt and not deposited f
  • 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.

    • Re:So I guess Elecrity is free in Siberia? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @05:26PM (#55486385) Homepage Journal

      I guess they mean that the value of the bitcoins covers the electricity cost. They must have some pretty serious mining capacity to earn enough and produce a several kilowatts of heat.

      • several kilowatts of heat

        Only in the USA would you need several kilowatts of heat to keep a 20sqm space warm. Appropriate insulation and you can do it with less than 1.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dak664 ( 1992350 )

        According to https://digiconomist.net/bitco... [digiconomist.net] it's now 228kWh per transaction and somewhere north of a megawatt to generate that $530/month gross profit. Should keep the pipes from freezing!

        Of course not all of that energy is turned into heat, some goes into the blockchain entropy /s

    • Re:So I guess Elecrity is free in Siberia? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @05:27PM (#55486387) Homepage

      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.

      Doubtful, but if you make enough money mining bitcoins to pay your for power bill, then your home heating is paying system for itself and therefore effectively free (outside of the initial capital cost, of course). I think that is what they were getting at.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They were already paying for the electricity to mine. So yes, they are heating their cottage for free. Headline is perfectly fine.

    • Re:So I guess Elecrity is free in Siberia? (Score:4, Funny)

      by chipschap ( 1444407 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @05:37PM (#55486459)

      Ehh, maybe it is. I don't exactly go to eastern Europe to often, so I don't exactly know.

      Didn't know Siberia had moved to Eastern Europe. I learn a lot on /.

    • Re:So I guess Elecrity is free in Siberia? (Score:4, Informative)

      by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @05:50PM (#55486521)

      1. Siberia is not in Eastern Europe.
      2. There is profit to be made, in several ways. First, you no longer pay for heating, so you save that amount. Then, you make money out of generating cryptocurrency.
      3. The guys in TFA have built a prototype and they want to make a business out of it - sell it to people as a heating device.

      I keep one room in my home warm during the winter through cryptomining - and make a profit too.

  • Are they prepared to freeze once their mining... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Friday November 03, 2017 @05:25PM (#55486379)
    ... 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.

    • He's paying for the electricity consumed by the processors performing bitcoin mining which create heat.

      He's paying for it with the bitcoins he mines. That's how it's free.

      • So neither free as in beer nor free as in software, but free as in marketing.

      • Does it make sense to buy anything with bitcoin? A few months ago I heard bitcoin was worth $1000. Then I heard it was $6000. If I was taking a chance I would just keep holding it. There is a possibility of a crash, but then what? How would I sell or spend it fast enough while it's still worth something?

  • 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

  • - 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... [buybitcoinworldwide.com]

    > 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.

    • 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.

      There's crypto-currencies made to be mined by CPUs and GPUs, ASICs can't mine it by design.

      There's also speculation involved, mining LTC a year ago might not have been beneficial or just barely enough to pay for the electricity, but today the value of LTC has gone up and could pay ten times what was paid in electricity a year ago.

  • 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?

      • 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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by j-beda ( 85386 )

          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.

          This is why if you are heating with electrical resistive heaters, your lightbulb choice doesn't really matter - the inefficiency in your lighting just contributes heat to the room that doesn't need to be added by your heating system.

          There are heat pump systems that can give higher than 100% efficiency in that they can move more heat energy from the outside to the inside than they use in electrical energy. Window mounted air-to-air units do exist but are not as efficient as ones that extract heat from underg

      • So far it's only gotten down to about 35F overnight but in the morning I arrived and it was 72F inside the shop with everything running. So I assume it didn't drop too low overnight. We do have gas heating here which is cheaper than electrical but it costs about $15 in electrical for every $100 I make operating the miners. My normal electrical usage at the shop is $120/mo and in September it was $388 but we had the AC running 24/7 and it was 90F outside and to offset 1000W takes like 1300W minimum. So that

  • This guy did the same thing in 2011:
    https://bitcointalk.org/index.... [bitcointalk.org]

    • No doubt. How many of us turn on Folding@Home or maybe SETI@Home once it gets cold? I've been doing that for years.

  • 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 so

    • I don't know where you live, but around here 3D printer filament isn't cheap.

    • > because I'm basically just heating the room I'm usually sitting in.

      That's how it works for supermodels. Which is why I use them for my heating.

  • 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),
  • I've been doing the same for the last couple of decades. I'd leave my machines running all night for heat. Before it was ripping CD's which used to take forever.

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by j-beda ( 85386 )

      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.

      Switching to a heat-pump would give you three or four (or more?) times as much heat energy as the electrical energy used, which might be a better long term investment of capital than bigger computing rigs - the electrical savings would continue long after the mining becomes non-cost efficient.

  • 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.

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