Yes indeed.  That's why the plan is (if I'm going through with this project) to use low power like 500W, so that I would be able to basically run the miner throughout the day pretty much always, as there will be enough unused power to run it while it is daylight, more or less.  And not to just turn it on for half an hour and then off again while the sun is shining maximally onto the panels.


Yes definitely.  Although with a heat pump that can apparently around 4x the energy input, the difference might disappear in a sense.  And if I run a miner, it would be extra utility ("free" bitcoins) as well.

These are very good points of course.  I did my own maths, based on about 500W for 6 hours a day, which is power I should have pretty much "always", even in winter.  That would be enough to heat all the water we need.  But yes, of course, it would mean that the miners do not run all the time, which is of course a thing to factor in.  That's why I was also thinking about running especially cheap, less efficient old miners - because in essence it would still be better and more fun than just burning the electricity anyways to heat water.  Some people (including "experts") I talked to suggested not getting a thermal solar installation anymore, but just PV and simply doing that instead for hot water.

It is also a good point though that of course it won't be worth it if it just generates $10 a year or whatever.  So that is indeed something to consider, especially as difficulty goes up and rewards are halved.  I will have to carefully look at the hardware suggested here (S9 and S19 with some boards disabled) to see what makes sense for me.

The alternatives would probably be getting a heat pump to more efficiently use the electricity (but then, the heat pump itself is a lot more expensive than a S19 with watercooling setup), or just keep using the oven (burning wooden pellets in my case) and selling the electricity back to the grid.

The discussion is quite interesting though, and I think it shows that the individual details matter very much - and that might be why miners for heating have not yet been a thing used more widely.

Yes definitely.  It is a cool idea (that has been floating around since the first ASICs were created), but it never really went anywhere for some reason.  Maybe it is not practical on a larger scale and without DIY aspects (as every requirement is different).

In my case, I'm fine doing a bit of DIY, such as building the control parts with a Pi or other small computer and modbus to the various other components (power meter, temperature sensors and so on), getting the watercooler to exchange heat with my boiler and stuff like that, but I'm not an expert at all about mining hardware, that's why I created this topic.

Yes, I'm aware of that.  The S19's are just the first "somewhat suitable" devices I found, but as you say, they are above the power range I think would be reasonable.  I can run the numbers again and maybe I could go with 2000W (or disable some boards as you say), but I was wondering if there are perhaps other devices that are lower-powered out of the box.

However, as stated in the OP, the first priority is using available electricity to produce heat (not the mining itself), so in any case, I would only run the miners intermittently.  And if I run them with 2000W, it means that the water I need heated is done sooner, so it would run for shorter periods of time.  The total energy usage and thus the total hash produced over some time frame would be fixed anyway; so it might not be worth it anyway.

I will need to look closely at the costs of course.  But disabling some of the boards sounds like at least one first potential option to consider, thanks!

I'm toying with the idea of using a Bitcoin miner to heat water (for domestic use) with excess electricity from a PV installation.  The goal is definitely to just use it when heat is needed and spare electricity is available, and not to run it always.  I'm not trying to maximise mining profit, but just do a fun project that has some useful purpose, too, but obviously I don't want to just burn a lot of money.

I can take care of all the control aspects easily, but I'm trying to determine whether or not there is suitable mining hardware available at all.  Basically I would need a miner with these properties:
- low power, 500-1000W intake
- can be watercooled easily (I'm not too much of a hardware tinkerer, so fitting some pre-made watercooler onto the board is the most I can do)
- cost in the $500-$2000 max range
- does not need to be the most efficient available, but obviously if it only makes $10 a year, there's no point

Does anything like this exist?  I've seen that there are watercooling solutions for S19's, but they draw a bit more power than I want to give it based on my estimates.

Names in Huntercoin don't expire similar to Namecoin, but they are tied to survival of the associated "character" in the game.  All characters are wiped periodically in what is called a "disaster", after which any names can be re-registered by anyone.  So there is no way to guarantee that you remain owner of a given name, even if you actively try to do so (unlike Namecoin where you have to renew in time but can do that to remain owner for as long as you wish).

But yes, apart from that, I think Huntercoin has a lot of historical significance - it is just not collectible (apart from owning the coins).

The chain may still be running, but honestly I have not checked in quite some time.  However, the screenshot you linked is slightly incorrect - Huntercoin does not use Namecoin names directly.  It uses the Namecoin codebase but on its own blockchain with modifications, like how Litecoin is based on Bitcoin but not "using Bitcoin assets".

I've seen interest from the historical NFT community in Huntercoin from time to time.  Unfortunately (from that point of view at least), Huntercoin does not have any collectible assets; account names are not durable, but get destroyed from time to time based on game events.  There is also the crown of fortune, but it is also something that gets transferred inside the game due to game play, so it cannot be "just owned" by a collector.

That's an interesting suggestion.  I think the main difficulty would be to come up with the right sort of tasks, i.e. such that the task is hard but easy to verify.  I'm no expert in number theory, so I don't know if there are efficient proofs for a number being prime (more efficient than finding one).  I assume you don't want to go with one of the algorithms that just prove a number is prime "with high probability".  The next difficulty probably would be coming up with a good economic model for the game, so it doesn't follow the typical hype-and-crash of play-to-earn games.

But all in all, if you can solve the design issues, it is probably not too hard to implement in Xaya.

It is not, but I think there are no important objections.  It just needs to be scheduled and coordinated with miners.  (And due to a conflict with merge mining, versionbits is not working on Namecoin (yet), so the activation code itself would have to be modified to be based on a block height or timestamp, but that is of course not a big issue.)  I expect that it will be activated sooner or later, just like Segwit was.

Your point about ordinals is a very interesting one.

I asked for proofs about your claims (that there was an offer for d/bitcoin of 5000 ETH, or that the owner was actively trying to sell).  You didn't provide any, and instead continue to just spread claims and FUD.  No use discussing any further.

As far as I know, the offer for d/bitcoin was 250 ETH, and it was declined.  Do you have any proofs for your claims to the contrary?  If not, then those should be discarded as purely FUD.

Regarding the Handshake money:  It was claimed for the Namecoin team (and I believe the Handshake guys actually meant it to be distributed to past contributors, not to the project for the future).  I personally declined to receive any of that money.  Namecoin got also some reserved names on Handshake (bit for sure, and perhaps namecoin as well, I don't remember the details), which I claimed using namecoin.org DNS.

As TradeRunner already stated, I see myself mostly as code maintainer for Namecoin (and also that at the moment mainly because Namecoin is the codebase on which the Xaya project is based).  I do not want to get involved in politics, and also do not want to voice or support any strong opinion about any non-technical issue.

The <address> in this case is not a Bitcoin address but a TCP address on which the ZMQ notifications will be published.  You will get notifications about all transactions, not filtered by Bitcoin address.  But you can then of course just implement your logic (checking for your set of addresses) in the handler.

Everyone who knows me knows that I don't want to get involved in any politics and just want to develop tech.  But let me clarify two things:  First, I've not been involved in any edits of the Namecoin wikipedia page in at least the last year or two; I am contributing to Wikipedia only under my typical username "domob".  Second, I have personally not received any of the Handshake funds and won't in the forseeable future either.

I would love to join, but this link gives me "the invite is invalid or has expired", same for the link on the website.

I guess you are just trolling.  But just in case this isn't clear, Namecoin's main purpose is (unlike most other altcoins/tokens) not to be an investment, but to be actually useful as decentralised domain name and general naming system.

In this particular case, though, they are building it on Flow, which is their own blockchain.  So it is not really a sign of "independent" developers switching to a competing system.

See here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=293382.0

As others have already pointed out, this is not possible (at least not easily) with Bitcoin Core alone.  As an alternative to block explorers already mentioned, you can also run ElectrumX (https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx) to generate and maintain a database indexed by address.  Once synced up, ElectrumX allows you to query exactly for the data you want.

Since you mentioned Xaya, note that it is actually based (code-wise) on Namecoin, which itself is based on Bitcoin Core.  So the core blockchain of Xaya is very similar to Bitcoin Core (but the "gaming magic" happens on a layer above that).  In that sense, you could just as well base all the higher-level gaming logic of Xaya on Bitcoin Core itself.  That would likely just make moves more expensive and slower, though, so in that sense it certainly would not "outperform" Xaya itself.  (But it would open up more network effects by using bitcoins on the platform.)

Interesting.  Aside from publishing names through a (centralised) server on 611.to, is there any other features that 611 has over Namecoin?  Because if that is all, then honestly it sounds like a cash grab to me - in Namecoin itself, everyone is free to just run something like 611.to on their own server if they want.  No fork or permission required to do so.  If you want a centralised server to resolve .bit, just go ahead and set one up.