this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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So, bitcoin miners
Fuck bitcoin. It should be allocated to desalinisation so less water is pulled from the rivers of the driest continent on Earth. The ecology around waterways is already in the shitter, and global warming is going to 10x that clusterfuck.
That is a good option too. How long does it take to spool up or ramp down desalination? I mentioned Bitcoin mining because it's super fast to come online or go offline depending on the energy requirements at the moment.
I doubt that would be terribly relevant. The lions share of the surplus energy should be predictable based on recent grid data + 24 hour weather forecasts.
Based on nothing but wikipedia the primary methods for desalination are distillation (boiling) and membrane; neither of which sound like ramp up time would matter.
Yeah, if time to come online and time to go offline doesn't matter, then that definitely works.
You wouldn't cover the cost of the miners if you had to shut turn them off and on like that. The worth of their hashing capabilities is nearly always declining as more and better miners come online.
But using the miners to do something else was always an interesting idea, like using them to heat a building. Maybe you could heat a swimming pool with them.
For home usage my thought would be use it as a hot water heater or a dryer for clothes or maybe even make a switchable 500 watt and 1500 watt version and use it as a space heater for those cold winter nights.
Ya, if you have a miner at home, it will reduce your heating bill. You just gotta find a good use for it when it's not cold outside, so something like supplementing your water heater as you mentioned would work ya.
I think there's merit in the idea. Someone makes an electric water heater purpose built for this and they build a miner card you can swap in/out as technology improves the the current one becomes obsolete. Uses the miner for primary heat, and when it's not enough uses regular electricity to make the heat.
See, that would be awesome as hell, because those appliances need heat. And so, mining with it basically subsidizes the heat that I would otherwise just be using anyway. It may not subsidize it completely, but any subsidy is better than no subsidy at all.
Just saw this today and thought you might find it interesting given our discussion
The city of Vancouver passed a motion to look into the city holding some Bitcoin as a financial reserve, and in the article I saw this mentioned
"But there are green efforts afoot in the bitcoin mining sector, and I think we could definitely look at those and how they might benefit paying for things like heating city pools and other sorts of services."
It would be pretty cool if the city was heating a pool with it and then paying off their bills with the mined coins.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-mayor-ken-sim-bitcoin-reserve-1.7408208
Anything where heat is needed is a good potential for a Bitcoin mine, just because heat is a waste byproduct of a Bitcoin mine, but that heat can be used for something else.
Pretty fast, from my understanding, because you're pumping water through a membrane, and the pumps can be turned on and off quite fast.
The maintenance costs are also quite high though, from my understanding.
Steel, aluminium and battery production can also make good use of lots of cheap renewable energy.
Or things like aluminium smelting/electrolysis.
On crypto, if it's green energy and there is enough of it, what's wrong? (It's not great, and a waste of hardware, but not as awful)
It's a waste of hardware, and a waste of energy that could be doing something useful.
The opportunity cost.
True
Wonder when the miners are going to switch over and start running AI models with microtransactions for public API access...