ASIC heaters

[GoldSparrow]

I keep hearing about how ASICs are going to be built into routers and water-heaters and such. I think that this meme is dangerous. This is a catchy thought that stops people from doing further analysis.

Sure, there is no technical reason why people could not mine with their water-heater for a trickle of satoshis. The important question is whether they will do this. It seems most likely to me that this practice will never catch on, because amateur miners will not be able to profit by doing it. That trickle of satoshis from your water heater will not be enough to pay for the cost of adding the chips to your water heater. Furthermore, to be a miner will require not just SHA2 chips, but a big hard drive and internet bandwidth. I know that the hardware can be cheap, but it seems unreasonable to expect cheap hardware to perform well enough to pay for itself when the difficulty is raised by cutting-edge mining farms.

I think people are in for a rude awakening by relying solely on the current POW to protect against unhealthy levels of centralization. It bothers me that almost every time the topic comes up I hear about the proverbial curling iron that mines Bitcoins and that is supposed to stop any further inquiry into the matter.

It seems clear to me that we need to add proof-of-stake to the protocol. POW has this very unhealthy non-linear relationship between the amount of money you spend on your rig and the amount of influence you get over the network. The ideal would be that the more money you spend you asymptotically approach a hard limit on how much influence you can acquire. I can think of no way to implement this, however, I will settle for a linear relationship between how much you spend and how much influence you get. This can be done with proof of stake, I think, and must be done.

[bitcoinator]

Furthermore, to be a miner will require not just SHA2 chips, but a big hard drive and internet bandwidth. I know that the hardware can be cheap, but it seems unreasonable to expect cheap hardware to perform well enough to pay for itself when the difficulty is raised by cutting-edge mining farms.

I don't think this is true. ASIC miners can just connect to mining pools via internet and they don't need much bandwidth. No hard disk is needed. ASIC heaters are likely to pay for heat at least.

[GoldSparrow]

Ok, so this is what I was talking about.

I don't mine, and it did not occur to me that you did not need to run a full node to mine. (However, I think since de-centralization is the goal, I would prefer full nodes.)

It is not enough to me to simply accept the answer, "the water-heater-asic will pay for itself, don't worry about it."

Let's take a wild stab at calculating this.

There are about 100 million households in the USA alone. Let's assume for the sake of argument that 10% of that number world-wide are equipped with asic-heaters.

Today the mining revenue was $406,223. This figure may go up over time, sure. Let's assume that the water-heater asics are able to capture 10% of the mining reward. I think that is generous.

So that's $40,000 bucks, spread over 10,000,000 households, which is $.004 per day, or $1.46 per year. I don't think that will motivate anyone to differentiate their water-heaters by adding asic chips.

If you feel that my math is off, feel free to offer your own numerically grounded argument. No one ever offers any numbers to back up the "asic heater" story -- it just gets repeated and people say "sounds good" and stop thinking.

[Gabi]

Of course no one will do that for 1.46$ per year. But just multiply bitcoin value by 100 (wich would mean the bitcoin market cap would be 100 billions, still not a lot) and it would be 146$

Right now the bitcoin economy is still very small

[teoqu]

This could be a pretty good idea, it just has a lot of risk

[bitcoinator]

Let's take a wild stab at calculating this.

Any calculation would rely on assumptions. Changing assumptions would change the result. E. g. we don't know how much would 1 btc cost in dollars.

I suggest a simpler proof:
1. In the long term Bitcoin mining with ASICs should be profitable (in mature market it should probably give few percents a year).
2. If mining is profitable for mining companies (that pay rent, salaries, etc), then for households it should be profitable too. Or at least cover the energy.

When hardware matures, energy costs for professional miners should be comparable with one for households. Maybe households would have advantage because they don't have much collateral expenses and the heat could be a desired feature, no need to spend energy on cooling

[3ham3]

Great idea but it has too much risk.

[AliceWonder]

ASIC routers I could see but I doubt there ever will be an ASIC chip in my Keurig or blender and certainly not in my water heater. It's gas, much cheaper than electric. And yes, it's all gas, works when there's a blackout.

[AliceWonder]

Here's an idea - the cable company could load a bunch of ASICs into the cable boxes they rent out.
Not to make the customer money, to make themselves money using the customer's power.

[bitcoinator]

ASIC routers I could see but I doubt there ever will be an ASIC chip in my Keurig or blender and certainly not in my water heater. It's gas, much cheaper than electric. And yes, it's all gas, works when there's a blackout.

Gas can be used to generate electricity. The output is still the heat, nothing lost.