Does this make sense? One of the main criticisms of bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies is the enormous amount of energy expended in mining. However, since all that energy is eventually going to turn to heat, if you already heat your home by resistive heating the mining is essentially free once you have paid for the hardware, and it may make you a few $$$s.
In a similar vein, are those huge datacenters which run the modern world located near industrial operations which could utilize all that waste heat? If not, why not?
I suspect the heat output relative to the size of the hardware is insufficient for practical heating purposes. In other words, someone doing mining from home will not use enough power to generate enough heat to warm the home. Meanwhile, someone with a proper mining rig using serious power is going to have it in a large building that is not a suitable home.
Rough guesses here. 2kW is your typical small portable fan heater.
The power supply for a high end PC might be rated 800W, but not all of that will be used by the machine, and not all of that by the GPU (which is important because mining rigs based on GPUs don’t necessarily use them installed in a desktop PC).
Let’s say a GPU running at full capacity takes 250W - all of which will end up as heat, so eight of them is roughly equivalent to a fan heater.
So a mining rig like this one is (by the above numbers) roughly equivalent to 10 portable fan heaters, which would certainly take the chill off a house, especially if they are running at 100% duty cycle.
And it only took $100k to set up! ‘Essentially free once you have paid for the hardware’ is a rather large sweeping under the rug.
Certainly some datacenters are consciously placed in places where the climate is better suited to cooling. Canada, Sweden, are emerging locations for that purpose.
Why aren’t all datacenters similarly situated? Because internet transfer speeds are a function of cable length, composition, and the transfer speed of routing equipment. For many use cases, I’m going to have a much better experience if the datacenter is geographically close to me. Most people aren’t closest to the coldest geographic regions of the world, so they need to be near a datacenter somewhere warmer.
Resistive heat is horrendously inefficient. The GPUs used in mining rigs are expensive (well, until yesterday or so). Electricity is not cheap, internet connectivity is not free. Unless you could scale up to datacenter size, you’re probably going to lose money on your operation, without generating enough heat to make your home livable.
I did some cocktail-envelope calculations once and I think I determined that if I mined just with my home computer then I could probably find one block every 8 years. At current prices that would be about $200 a month. The hardware wouldn’t heat my home adequately, but the $200 would. Minus hardware and energy I found it to be a wash.
What it comes down to is that locating your data processing operation in a cool climate can help reduce your cooling costs, at the expense of being far from your customers (and maybe from where you live). That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t justify setting up a datacenter in Alaska.
Honestly I think it would be a more cost-effective cottage industry to run a render farm in your house. Crypto miners are now dumping huge amounts of GPU onto the market at discount rates. Like crypto mining, it’s not going to heat your house adequately. But if you’re in a cold climate climate then it can defray what would normally be a big operating cost (cooling).
Heat that’s usable for industrial purposes is going to be at much higher temperatures than computer processors can survive generating. If you just want it for climate control, most large-scale facilities (of any sort, including just offices) already produce too much heat, and need to be actively cooled.