Why is nobody sticking ASICs in residential electric boilers?

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Avatar for Kain_niaK
3 years ago

You have all seen these, right?

Residential Electric Boiler

They keep water at a 95 Celsius temperature, just below boiling point (this is the most effective way of keeping it warm).

When you need warm water, it will mix it with cold to give you a pleasant temperature for your shower also when it moves through piping it quickly drops from 95C.

It can also be used to heat up homes by pumping hot water through radiators. They use them a lot in europe, usually those hot water radiators are installed under windows.

Now 99% of the energy that goes in to a computer comes out in the form of heat. Bitcoin miners produce heat at about 105C.

So why not buy an old used miner that can't make money anymore unless you have free electricity?

Now you buy a used warm water boiler. You stick the bitcoin miner in it, so that when the boiler activates because the water temp is dropping under 90C, the miner starts mining.

You hook it up to 3G/4G/5G access point and point it at your pool.

Now you locally find the lowest price for a new warm water boiler, and you sell your boiler for a price 10 maybe 20% under it.

Now the people that bought it, the more showers they take the more Bitcoin you mine. They pay for the electricity. Their boiler won't be 100% efficient anymore, but it might still be 90% efficient perhaps even 95% efficient.

It boggles my mind that nobody has done this yet.

Now you use the mining profits to do it again. Rinse and repeat. You could start the biggest warm water boiler company in the world and bankrupt your competition by selling 25% under their prices and if you do it properly nobody would figure out your secret, that you are mining Bitcoin without paying for electricity but also without stealing it from somebody. That couple of % loss of efficiency compared to regular water boiler? Nobody will notice and everybody is happy that you sell them boilers for 20% under your nearest competitors price.

You sell a 100 million boiler like this and you pretty much control the entire Bitcoin network. Prices of electricity go up worldwide, you laugh. It does not affect you much because people really like their hot showers.

Oh yeah and you will provide all your customers with life time free boiler repair, cause you know once in while those Bitcoin miner might need some maintenance ....

2
$ 0.50
$ 0.40 from @TheRandomRewarder
$ 0.10 from @inf
Avatar for Kain_niaK
3 years ago

Comments

The image you show is just a water heater that keeps water at 57C. Boilers typically use oil or gas because using electricity to heat is horribly expensive. When you DO use electricity, it will be 240 or 280 volts, much higher than the 120V that is the mainstay of US residential wiring.

I don’t know how hot computer hardware can get without damaging it, but in order to boil water, the mining hardware itself would have to be operating well above 100C. I imagine this would not be ideal.

While we are going absurd, if we are creating very hot water, we might as well take it up a notch and use the heat of mining to generate superheated steam. Then you could feed this into a steam turbine and generate electricity and feed that back into the grid.

$ 0.00
3 years ago