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Heating a home with a Bitcoin miner: Staying warm with sats

Heating a home with a Bitcoin miner: Staying warm with sats

Bitcoin (BTC) miners emit a lot of heat. 

Some miners use that heat to warm swimming pools, dehydrate meat to make beef jerky or even dry out timber at a Swedish hydropower Bitcoin farm. In Ireland, the “Bitcoin Farmer” joked that he hangs out laundry to dry in front of his Bitcoin miner.

Miner heat is not new to the Bitcoin industry. In the early days of Bitcoin, enthusiasts would mine the cryptocurrency with their everyday computers, leading to overheating and stories of uncomfortably warm environments.

Bitcoin mining has changed since the early days. With the markedly increased difficulty of solving hash computations on the Bitcoin blockchain, miners have ditched ubiquitous graphics processing units for more powerful application specific integrated circuits, or ASICS. However, heating and cooling still remain an issue.

In a nod to the future of capturing waste heat, Satoshi Nakamoto shared a message showing precognition:

“The heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.” 

So why not take advantage of that heat and use it for productive resources? That’s exactly what I wanted to experiment with at my home near Lisbon, Portugal, this winter. 

Do-it-yourself solutions that utilize Bitcoin miner “waste” heat in the home are increasingly popular. However, it can be tricky. The #mine4heat hashtag on Twitter boasts Bitcoin hobbyists who can rewire and soundproof Bitcoin miners — without electrocuting themselves.

One savvy miner heats their mobile home, an airstream, while others have found ingenious ways to mine Bitcoin and keep their homes toasty:

However, for the “average Joe,” like me, it seems daunting. I’m a technologically stunted Bitcoin enthusiast who took years to run a node. So while the idea is appealing, I feared I might burn the house down. 

There are several heater-cum-Bitcoin mining companies, like Heatbit and BitHeater, which are aware of Bitcoin miners’ ability to make money while heating spaces, but also that there could be pent-up demand for a plug-and-play solution.

Heatbit founder Alex Busarov told Cointelegraph that while ease of use was appealing, the environmental use case for Bitcoin miner heat drove the mission:…

Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Cointelegraph.com News…