Bitcoin Forum

then no one will have to work

edit:  holy shit money is free!!

what happens when bitcoin is all mined up? you paid an extra 30-40k for a house that now wont sell for more than 5  lol seriously this is redicuous

hardware gets obsolete easily, and mining gets less and less profitable every day.

But might be a good think to keep in your house warm if you live in Siberia or in the North Pole

Hopefully in the near future when mining has become marginally profitable then 20nm hashing chips would be commodity hardware that you can buy in bulk on DigiKey. You can then build your house with electric heaters that hash. You probably won't make a profit but you'd help guaranteed that mining remains decentralized.

Heck, why not right? I mean if there was a way to turn mining units in to heating systems that use up just marginally more electricity than normal heaters, that'd be pretty neat. That'd create a very interesting paradigm wouldn't it?

[Then again, I could just be talking crazy...]

Miners use no more electricity than an electric heater.  100% of the electrical energy "used" by the miner is converted to thermal energy (heat).  Of course in most places there are more cost effective methods of heating a house such as natural gas furnace, propane, or heat pump.

Yeah, except the wiring used in an electric heater are a hell of a lot cheaper then making a bunch of ASIC chips.

I just heard they are upping the price of electricity so we better get a move on this before they make the rates to high to even mine.

But your electric heater doesn't look as cool as a miner, right? ;D

Not sure it's worth it though :)

True, and as you say, the electricity draw is only equivalent (well, for the most part) to a space heater in terms of "heating" up a space (in fact, I think a website did a study on this).

If there was a way of having multiple sources of heat through mining (having small miners embedded in different locations with fans circulating the heat, or some sort of schematic like that), and the system's electricity draw is at (or just marginally more) than the electricity draw of one of those houses with the more efficient electric heating systems, that'd be awesome.

I think we will see bitcoin miners used as heaters moving forward in time.  It all comes down to how one can heat his home most cost-effectively.

The majority of apartment buildings and even many smaller houses in my area use electric baseboard heaters.  These devices perform the following conversion:

     1 kW of electrical power -> 1 kW of heat.

Imagine making a new device that instead performs this conversion:

     1 kW of electrical power -> 1 kW of heat + X bitcoins / day

Which device would a rational economic actor choose to heat your home?  The answer is that he would choose the bitcoin heater if the extra cost he pays overtop of the price of the simple heater is less than the revenue he expects to earn from mining.  

Heater = simple resistor with some protection for people don't get toasted. Super simple and cheap to produce.

Mining ring = computers with lots of hard to produce, failure prone and expensive components, like gpus and ASICs. 

I think only people already prone to buy miners would consider using then also as heaters

So you agree with me.  If electrical "mining" heaters can't be made cheap, reliable and easy enough, then there would be no economic advantage to using one in place of a simple electric heater so then they won't be used. 



If the mining-heaters can be made cheap, reliable and simple such that using them saves money, then of course people would install them.  Do you think the average person knows how a heat pump works?

It all comes down to what is most cost effective.

I have no interest in hand-waving debates about "what will be most cost effective in various scenarios at some distant point in the future" as we'll both likely be wrong.  

In any case, it'll be cool to have the option for a bitcoin mining heating solution in the future.  :)

mining gets less profitable every day. If all of us start including bitcoin miners in houses as amenities, it will not bring us any bitcoins at all!

They will be unprofitable investments indeed. I doubt it will ever be worth it to do this.

Some people haven't been reading the difficulty graph.

what if we made the amenities wireless and charged a monthly fee

Amenities :o . Do you thing owner is a crazy or stupid for installing hardware worth thousands. And what about other problems like electricity, heating, mentainance.

You're high if you think computer chips that can process something can ever be made as cheap (or anywhere close to as cheap) as a bunch of resistors made to just to burn electricity.

no i mean ones in the furnace silly buns

You're stupid if you think that was the argument (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=589758.msg6476192#msg6476192).  Begone troll. 

Mining will always be needed. There will be transaction fees paid to miners, which by the final difficulty adjustment, will be higher than the mining reward.

mining gold is now for the people that can afford excavators

mining bitcoin is now for the people that can afford asic farms

trying to say every household should have a rig just as futile as giving everyone a pickaxe. the reward will be dst amounts and due to the large uptake of silent mining in the background of all homes. the difficulty would be so high that peoples electricity bills will be something like $50 per day, with only 1c bitcoin reward per day

if people want bitcoin, they should BUY IT. much the same as gold. buying gold is much easier then mining it. infact if someone pickaxe mined gold for a month. they would yield less gold then just being employed and putting a months salary into gold.

basically, its cheaper to buy bitcoin then to waste time and labour mining it.

as for the worry of outside entities attacking bitcoin via 51% attacks. ..... its been 5 years with plenty of oppertunity to attack bitcoin when difficulty was much lower.. its past the point of being damaged from outsiders.

solo mining from a home will yield zero reward so each home would have to be linked together as a pool. there is actually more risk of a 51% attack by having households all mining. as their house would be attached to a corporate owned mining pool. much like your hous is attached to a corporate owned telephone company/electric company. thus the corporation will have the control. you honestly think corporations would build miners into your housewall and simply let you choose which pool?.. nope it would be fixed and only a few large corporations which sell leases to each other would be allowed to be picked. much like the hidden workings of telephone industry

True. It is a bit strange to me that many people wants to enter mining even when it is not profitable.

I wish! Then booooom the price

Well kind of. It wouldn't be like free miner you would still have to mine several months till the miner pays off because let's say house costs $200000 with 3 TH/s miner which cost $10000. The miner isn't free Its price is included in the house total price. $200000 - $10000 = $190000. $190k is the real house price.

This would only work if it was powered by solar electricity etc. to offset dificulty and power costs.

The difficulty will be so high that your "heater" can only generate very little bitcoin. :)

Free heating! EXACTLY what i need   :) :) :) ;D ;D

The difficulty has been increasing at a slower rate recently. :)
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small-lin-10k.png

You have a valid point, there is no way to ensure what pool you'll be mining for. Once again, at the bare minimum, it's only advantageous if the cost of a miner would in the long run cost less than the cost of a heater and electricity.

Will one day end