I was just thinking about this when considering interesting options to power mining operation.
What about a bike connected to a generator?
I believe a set up like that can power a house. If you extrapolated that out it leads to interesting questions. How many rigs could you power, and assuming it's possible at all. Is it possible to make a days wage or higher with such a process?
Ideas. thoughts and discussion welcome.
I just looked at the wattage and am very unsure.
One article on costs and how:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a10245/pedal-power-how-to-build-a-bike-generator-16627209/I looked up how many watts one could produce by running on a bicycle and ended up with articles like this one:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/bicyclepower.htmlThe writer estimates one can produce ~100 Watts, not substracting any loss due to conversion or any hardware/repair costs.
An antminer S9 is currently the "best" ASIC on the market (the best J/Gh rate on the market).
It has a power draw of 1375W + 7% and a hashrate of 14 Th.
Basically, you'd need 14 of those bikes running 24/7 to power 1 antminer S9.
At current diff, block reward and BTC price, you'd make $12.91 a day (since your power would be "free"
https://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/bitcoin-mining-calculator/?h=14000&p=0&pc=0.00&pf=1&d=1103400932964.29000000&r=12.50000000&er=4087.21110000&hc=0.00In order to run 14 bikes 24/7, i'd estimate you'd need at least 70-80 people employed fulltime
In my country you'll work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks, 25 hollidays + 5 religious hollidays, 5 days of being ill (estimated) = 1800 hours/year
you need 14 bikes * 365 days * 24 hours = 122640 hours
122640/1800 = 68,1 fulltime employees (if everything goes right, and this only covers the bikes, not the maintenance, long illnesses, accidents, paperwork... So i'm going to assume you need at least 80 fulltime employees to cover all bases)
So, in my country, the costs would be:
80 employees * €35.000 + 1 antminer S9 (€1100) + 18 bikes (14 bikes + 4 spare bikes... I estimate them at €1000/piece including the convertor) = close to 3 million euro's/year
The profits would be €11*365 =~ €4000/year
The negative profit of the setup would be close to a net loss of about 3 million a year...