[piker]

Why can't the proof of work be a series of adversarial StarCraft games or something? At least then all of these GPU cycles (is that the term with GPUs?) and power consumption creates something we can watch and be entertained by.

[EA]

Why don't we add processors to water heaters and HVAC systems to do something useful with the heat generated by the processors?

[tlb]

It would require the silicon to run at higher temperatures than when air-cooled. Semiconductor failure rate roughly doubles every 10C temperature rise. For most environments, it's better to spend energy to actively cool the silicon than extract heat energy from it, because the cost of failures is higher than the cost of power.

[undersuit]

I know you said air-cooled, but what about a Peltier cooler? Silicon stays cool, water gets hot, win-win.

[kiddico]

I don't know if it's a frequency illusion or if a lot of people are playing with them lately, but I've seen tons of people mentioning peltier cooling lately.

I've been working on a design to cool my cpu with one. The best part about peltier modules is also the worst part: the cold side gets really cold. So cold you get below the humidity threshold, and end up with water all over your system. I'm trying to hook up a bunch of humidity, and temperature sensors to an arduino that will regulate the power to the peltier module to try to only let it get as cool as the relative humidity will safely allow.

What I'm getting at is you could do it, but a peltier cooler would need to be manufactured for it to be reasonable at the scale they're looking for.

Separate from the condensation problem they use a LOT of power. They're not terribly efficient, which would likely defeat the purpose. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling#Perform... )

[qplex]

I remember them being used for "extreme" overclocking.

Nowadays people in that department seem to have moved to the elegant solution of manually pouring LN2 on to a cup that sits on top of the CPU (or GPU).

How about water cooling?

[sathackr]

http://en.hotmine.io/

"Bitcoin Boiler"

[base698]

Water is basically a sink, and it requires more btus than the minor amount a miner would generate.

[sathackr]

some of these miners use many kilowatts of power. Take a look at those power cables, all that energy has to leave as heat.

[philbarr]

I would rather it be put to work finding genome sequences or something.

[exit]

probably because it's slow to verify and the difficulty is not readily adjustable

[SmallDeadGuy]

Slow to verify, sure, but difficulty is definitely easily adjustable. Just scale up the game map and number of units, suddenly you have a larger search space for navigation and more AI objects to manoeuvre, too.

[exit]

hmm, fair point, but i'd have to see proof that the difficulty is linearly adjustable with 256 bits of granularity

[abledon]

Make a pull request =)