BizPlan: Why Waste Energy Mining Bitcoin, When We Could Replace Electric Space Heaters with Distributed Bitcoin Mining Servers?
Let's not burn the planet just to collect cryptocurrency when we could at least heat some homes and leverage power already being consumed.
This article is both a business plan and an energy conservation plan.
It occurred to me during the 2021 Texas power crisis, that while people were freezing in their dark suburban homes on the outskirts of Dallas, the core downtown and financial districts were still brightly lit and warm because our culture deems it more important to keep computer servers running 24/7 than to keep people from literally freezing.
I got curious as to how many of those computer servers in downtown skyscrapers were doing nothing but mining bitcoin? How many floors of downtown office space were dedicated to such absurd activities? How much of the heat generated by those servers was just being dumped into the cold winter night air by power-consuming HVAC systems?
I don’t have numbers for Dallas or for Texas specifically, but in 2021, it was estimated that bitcoin mining consumed 110 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity— about 0.55% of global power production. Given that an average home requires about 12 MWh/yr to heat, it follows that the electricity currently being used to mine bitcoin could heat about 9 million homes. At $0.134/kWh (average U.S.), the cost of heating one home is about $1,608.00 per year. Nine million homes? $14.5 Billion.
So, with 110 TWh, we could heat 9 million homes, or…
We could mine some quantity of bitcoin (BTC) worth, presumably, more than $14.5 billion, or…
We could do both. On the same bit-nickel, so to speak.
Both space-heating devices (baseboard electric heaters, space heaters with fans, space heaters with self-contained liquid that look like a small steam radiator and even fake fireplace heaters) and bitcoin mining servers are devices that convert very close to 100% of all the electricity they use into heat. The difference is that the bitcoin mining server can also produce valuable information (crypto tokens).
To make the best use of both heat and information, all one needs to do is productize a bitcoin mining server that turns itself on when the house is cool and turns itself off when the house is toasty. There might be a short lag while the server finishes testing one possible crypto-key before the server turns off. One could get fancy and adjust the server clock-cycle time to adjust the heat produced. The unit would upload info to central servers via WiFi and notify both the company and the occupants of the home being heated when bitcoins are found and captured into the blockchain.
It’s kind of a sweet little IoT project, if I may say so myself.
The value proposition for the company is that it gets free electricity for its bitcoin servers since the home occupants were going to be running a heater using the same amount of electricity anyway.
The value proposition for the home occupant is they get free use of a “heater” and a chance to share in a fraction of the bitcoin proceeds. For example, perhaps if a bitcoin is mined in an occupant’s home, the company would make sure their entire winter heating bill was paid with their crypto proceeds (jackpot!). The rewards to the occupants simply need to reflect an upside that makes participating in the distributed bitcoin-mining operation attractive.
Voila! That’s the business plan. The company mining bitcoin with this strategy will enjoy a great advantage in efficiency and lower cost over companies mining bitcoin without reclaiming the value of heat generated by their servers.
Some practical considerations. The company might want to monitor that the “heaters” are being used a minimum percentage of the time to justify their deployment to a particular house. Alternatively, systems could be appropriately sized to the dwelling and climate. If the “heaters” contain valuable off-the-shelf computing components such as graphics cards (wouldn’t junior love to get his hands on one or two of those?) some security hardware might be deemed prudent to prevent the device from being opened and “parted-out”.
Now all I need is funding, a small management team and a juicy stock option.
Thanks for reading.
© 2022 Martin Bishop, All Rights Reserved.
This is a great idea -- the latest in a list of ideas from a great creative mind. My sense is that it is economically viable, but needs a backer to get it started. You need network software to distribute the processing, and you need access to someone's bitcoin mining code. Then you create a standalone unit that uses 1500 watts, convenient for most homes. It probably has processing power of ~10 PCs and it costs a few hundred dollars in production costs, a few million in startup costs. Maybe Steve Kirsch would be interested in backing the idea.