A Canadian miner posted an interested tweet today, showing an image of his house being heated with the excess energy created by his bitcoin miners.
This is the prototype Francis is referring to. It completely and comfortably heat my 6000 sqft home, at my desired temperature during Quebec winters. The excess of heat is extracted outside. Fully quiet, it works 365 days 24/7. . It host 6 ASIC miners. pic.twitter.com/NgXiQK2tcr
— Jonbros ⚡️ (@Jonbros01) November 18, 2018
The miner claims his mining operation run through 6 units of S9 asic miners is still profitable in Quebec, Canada.
“In today Bitcoin market the system is mining at profit in Québec S9 (monthlyUSD cost$383, revenu560$ ), PLUS I save money and protect the environment as I don’t need to heat my home.
The system got No fan, it’s not required the way it’s designed.”
This Canadian miner plans to install additional elements to this system, like accumulation tanks and heat exchangers and commercialize the whole setup. First batch of 100 miner/heaters is already in plan.
As you could expect, bitcoin maximalists jumped on the opportunity to disprove the thesis of bitcoin mining being an energy wasting process that endangers the environment.
If this takes root and people really start using bitcoin miners as heaters, this would nullify one of the main arguments out of the hands of bitcoin objectors: energy wasting.
Due to the complex calculation the energy cost of Bitcoin is high in comparison with that of conventional financial transactions. For example, according to one estimate, processing a Bitcoin transaction consumes a lot more energy than 100,000 VISA transactions. Of course, those bitcoin critics ignore all the energy spent in the accompanying operations that have to happen for VISA transactions to take place in the first place. It is an eclectic approach to the issue.
Other saw additional benefits of this system and its future refinements in the sense of increased mining decentralization. Everybody has to warm up his home so why not neutralize those heating costs by concurrently earning bitcoin.
As ASIC improvements slow & life cycles increase this will become more and more common. Capturing otherwise wasted excess heat from bitcoin miners to offset existing heating costs. This will help to further distribute bitcoin mining due to diseconomies of scale. https://t.co/xU7h6NqcLN
— Matt Odell (@matt_odell) November 18, 2018
As Investopedia defines it, diseconomies of scale happen when a company or business grows so large that the costs per unit increase. It takes place when economies of scale no longer function for a firm. With this principle, rather than experiencing continued decreasing costs and increasing output, a firm sees an increase in marginal costs when output is increased. Diseconomies of scale can occur for variety of reasons, but the cause usually comes from the difficulty of managing an increasingly large workforce.
This is something that awaits the behemoths of bitcoin mining of today, most notably Bitmain. Bitcoin mining is mostly a centralized operation run in China by couple of big companies. There goes the “bitcoin is centralized” argument down the drain as well.
