If and only if you would have used electrical heating anyway, then using a GPU's waste heat for heating your home is one of the best things you can do with it and it's "100% efficient". That is, 100% of all the energy your GPU consumes also ends up as heat in your house and it's thermodynamically equivalent to any other type of resistive electric heater.
Of course, the energy consumed by any even semi-serious mining operation far exceeds a home's heating needs.
However, resistive heating is 3-4 times less efficient then ground/air source heating, so if your actual aim is to heat the house, you can do a lot better[1]. It's just better, if you're generating heat anyway, to also use the waste heat than to dump it outside.
[1] YMMV in permafrost regions, and the hardware is too expensive for many people.
Not necessarily, a FIR heater (which is also resistive) deposits a larger fraction of its input energy in humans than a GPU cooler which heats the air which then indirectly warms the human and also everything else.
They do use little electric heaters some of the time.
And there's smaller mining operations, the economies of scale aren't that great, more the difficulty of finding GPUs. You can lend it to neighbors and give them a cut of the proceeds, you could do the whole town. So in fact ordinary mining operations waste the heat, this would not.
I want to answer the other poster who shows up dead: how can you lend a miner? Like lending a little heater. Like lending a cow, one guy needs milk the other wants the meat and hide. So if you already have all the electrical heat you really need for your house but want to mine more, you won't benefit from more heat for your own house. Whereas maybe across the street a neighbor is still using little electrical heaters a lot, doesn't understand crypto very well. So they work something out, the neighbor gets heat, pays the electric bill, and gets a cut of the mining, and the original miner provides the GPU through his contacts and gets a share too. So that way the heat doesn't go to waste, and the miner can scale.
Clarifying for alisonkisk, lend means 20 cards instead of 10 you need for heating, lending the other 10 out to a neighbor for his heating. Economies of scale, for instance by buying more cards at a time at a better unit price.
How can you lend your miner to a neighbor for heat? You all need heat at exactly the same time. Are you going to move the rig to a different home every hour?
Well right, you can't. Very good point. But perhaps you have guests for a month and when they leave they have guests, that means more of the house has to be heated instead of sealed off. I've seen that in huge houses.
I have some doubts that any significant amount of cryptomining is actually done in Siberia. Part of that would include a few questions of the definition of “Siberia”, a deep examination (i. e. a suggestion to google) people’s ideas of the weather condition at that hypothetical place, and maybe a comparison of efficiency of heating a typical rural Russian home with coal vs. burning coal to generate electricity to run GPUs, after transmission over sowjet-era grids.
Considering how cryptocurrencies seem to attract the get-rich-quick crowd, it’s impressive to see the levels of motivated reasoning they are capable of, since neither motivation nor reasoning alone seem to be among their usual strengths.
It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
Proof of Stake can work alright in certain market conditions, but those didn't exist on any blockchain until relatively recently. Look at the utter chaos going on with Terra validators. The validating token goes to approximately zero, so bad actors can cheaply buy up the staking asset and hijack validation, further destabilizing the network, allowing the next attackers to buy in even cheaper.
It's a hard problem, and Satoshi's solution is an incredibly elegant one. If you've got a better idea than PoW, then do share. Whoever figures it out stands to make billions of dollars. You should know that it's mostly considered to be a solved problem at this point, and nearly everyone has moved on to other hard problems in the space.
PoW is not useless. Hashcash in its original form is a prime example. It’s good design/engineering that solves a problem.
Blockchains are not useless. Append only, verifiable data structures have countless applications that again, can be used to solve actual problems.
Systems which combine these to create a “trillion+ economy” that’s sole external affect appears to be inducing an obsessive overuse of the word “fiat” while consuming incomprehensible amounts of the worlds resources—not just power, but hardware, and importantly, the focus of many intelligent people—that is a venture of questionable use.
> It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
The calculation itself, once removed from bitcoin ecosystem, is quite useless.
> Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth.
How is "find the nonce" PoW better for democracy than "fold proteins" or "find a chain of primes" PoW? In what way does calculating primes or folding proteins require global registry of every human on earth?
> Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
What about internet and expensive hardware, don't you need those also? What would you need besides those to do "fold protein" or "find chain of primes" PoW.
See gridcoin, it is a proof of stake currency where you can additionally earn coins via mostly useful scientific computing. It's a neat project, but it gives effective control to the boinc server managers. The users have to sign up to earn that way
my understanding is that gridcoin "rewards" people participating in boinc by incrementing numbers on a blockchain that uses proof of stake. It doesn't use scientific computing, like protein folding, as a proof of work for the chain itself, which is what the parent comment was all about.
I would love to be proven wrong, to see any reference that grc provides algorithmic benefit to boinc, as in "getting rewarded with grc is proof the provided solution for the requested scientific computation is correct", or even a little thing like storing the boinc participation statistics, but those are features of the boinc network independently from grc.
What grc provides to the scientific community is a weird incentive for monkey-brains: monkey brain sees grc number go up, monkey brain releases happy hormones. It is a mirror of the participation statistic on the blockchain, not because that makes sense, but because blockchain. Sure there is some theory that some monkey may give a monkey a banana for making their number go down and its number go up, but that transaction involves no scientific computation and is purely speculative.
> PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
This is a complete, steaming, and self-serving pile of bullshit. It isn't at all democratic and you need far more than just "electricity" to participate.
Sure, but what % of heating is just natural gas furnaces?
We should evaluate things against what the actual, real world alternative would be, not just against the best possible world.
(That said, I should acknowledge that a large part of that electricity comes from burning natural gas at an efficiency loss, so resistive heating is still worse than the natural gas furnace.)
Yes, and that's very nice if you have a heat pump. I suspect people with heat pumps use them for heat. It'd be weird if they didn't.
But, to restate my previous comment: if you have a natural gas furnace and a GPU, but no heat pump, and are deciding which to use for heat, it doesn't matter how efficient the heat pump you don't have is.
If you own your own home and have the capital to get a heat pump, great, do it. But a lot of people rent. They can't just swap out their furnace for a heat pump.
Here in the US, I don't think these are in common use. At least, I've never seen one in person. Are they used much wherever you are? They do seem like an interesting idea. Here's a US Dept of Energy page about them: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/absorption-heat-pumps
I have a geothermal heat pump. I am not in the US (3 phase 400V electricity is common here). I'd suppose nowadays they should be pretty standard. Some heat pumps also work both ways, e.g. they can heat and cool.
As an extra benefit the heat pumps have lower maintenance, risk.
(responding here, but applies to all currently at this level)
Ahh, now I see where there might be confusion. Heat pumps that operate on electricity are increasingly common in the US. Most of them are air-to-air, but some are ground-source. What I'm claiming are rare-to-non-existent are residential heat pumps that operate directly off of natural gas, using an ammonia absorption process, with no electricity involved.
Arguably 'freemint' was saying that it's more efficient to generate electricity centrally using natural gas and then distribute this electricity to power heat pumps than to burn natural gas for heat at each site. Yes, likely. My surprise was that I thought he was claiming that non-electric natural gas powered heat pumps were currently available to residential consumers. I knew this style exists (see the link I gave above) but I've never seen one in operation.
From what i have heard it varies a lot on a state by state basis. I suppressed my urge to look up heat pump statistics because frankly i should work on more important things. Just uhhmmm please don't act like i am supposed to research for you unpaid. I might fall for it and hate myself for it later.
