One of the first crypto personalities in Norway did this back in 2011. Even had an article in the local paper. “Local man heats bathroom with his computer”. Basically he had water based heating in the floor on his bathroom and had hooked the water cooling on his computer to that. Even had a script that would “start doing heavy calculations” when the temperature sunk below a threshold.
I was kinda considering this to use up the excess production from our solar panels, because the net metering is only returning a fraction of the market price. It will depend on the ROI from a small homelab-sized mining rig.
Even with the increase in prices, electric heating is still much more expensive than gas heating (unless you use a heat pump, but then you're not mining anything).
I sold all my Ethereum miners around 2017 I think because proof of stake was “coming soon”. It arrived a few months ago haha. I used the profits and all future money to just buy coins and that has worked much better. :)
I do miss the heat of the Ethereum mine though. Thank you for sharing your story, it brings back a lot of memories. It also echoes the stories of most Bitcoin mining companies I read in The Age of Cryptocurrency by Casey and Vigna. Always racing on the hamster wheel of profitability against the difficulty algorithm and electricity prices and flirting with or going bankrupt. I’m glad proof of stake is finally here and we can move to a more sane way of doing things.
I’m glad proof of stake is finally here and we can move to a more sane way of doing things.
Proof of Stake isn’t a drop in replacement for Proof of Work - it comes with completely different properties and implications. If you’re just looking at it from the perspective of running a miner in your room, sure, but if you’re talking about the security and longevity of the actual network…
Proof of Work means participants in the network exchange energy to validate transactions. Anyone may participate without permission. Anyone may leave at any time.
Proof of Stake means participants in the network, that already hold a large stake in the network (32ETH in Ethereum) deposit that stake in exchange for permission to validate transactions. You may not withdrawal your stake (Coming Soon™) and if the transactions you publish are not inline with the rest of the network, you are fined (slashing).
So while it’s true both PoS and PoW can be used to validate and secure a blockchain network, they couldn’t be further from each other. Proof of Work is currently the only solution for a truly decentralized network that’s not susceptible to coercion.
To mine bitcoin you need to buy an asic, which is a single purpose physical good with at most two original maker (fabs). It needs to be physically received. This single distribution is trivial to track by the authorities and makes bitcoin mining a permissioned system.
Energy use is so large mining at any non-negligible scale anonymously is impossible. Any serious miner will have to open a company, move to a special facility and get a special energy connection. Mining only makes financial sense in few countries with cheapest energy. Last but not least, due to the difficulty mechanism mining for anyone but enormous miners requires pooling with others.
Pools are public entities that are yet another possible layer of control by regulation. Adding all that and the conclusion is that PoW has zero resistance to regulations. China could take over bitcoin, but they decided to throw away mining instead, only making it possible for America to do so in turn.
All it takes is indirect or direct control over >50% of hashrate to censor anything. It's not possible to create a fork without censoring miners, because any minority fork can be trivially attacked in an adversary situation. If any PoW network even becomes important for American government to try to censor it there's no defense.
To stake in ethereum, you need to buy eth, which can be trivially bought anonymously from anyone that owns eth, most likely fully online without any physical contact. A more permissionless system isn't possible. There's no physical trail, both from ordering asics and from energy use. All that's needed is an internet connection. Staking can be easily fully anonymous and can happen anywhere in the world. That's why PoS is the only way to have a decentralized network.
It's always possible to fork with any arbitrary subset of validators, whether for censorship reasons or other disagreements.
PoW is objectively worse than PoS in literally everything but as a method to distribute coins. Mining is a way to sell coins for energy and hardware cost, which is an advantage at the cost of being worse in everything else, but only in the early period.
> To mine bitcoin you need to buy an asic, which is a single purpose physical good with at most two original maker (fabs). It needs to be physically received. This single distribution is trivial to track by the authorities and makes bitcoin mining a permissioned system.
There is no hard limit here on the supply chains for miners, this is like saying "there are at most two mobile phone operating systems". Sure it is somewhat true, but there is no deep reason it must be true.
Second, bitcoin mining is not a permissioned system. A permissioned system means that the system itself imposes permissions. You are talking about actions outside of the system that would perhaps incentives people to not use the system. This is a concern but not the same as being a permissioned system.
> All it takes is indirect or direct control over >50% of hashrate to censor anything.
For bitcoin PoW and ethereum PoS (hashrate => stake percentage) this is true. However the difference is that with PoW it is possible to increase the supply of mining hashrate to overthrow this quorum of censorship by literally building more physical hardware. In ethereum, if this ever happens there is no recourse as the supply of coins to stake is finite.
> Proof of Work is currently the only solution for a truly decentralized network that’s not susceptible to coercion.
Enter Proof of Space and Time. PoST improves upon Proof of Work to maintain the high level of security PoW provides (if not improve upon it) while using considerably less energy. It essentially does the work once instead of for every block, storing the proofs with space and using the time component to collectively move the chain forward.
For now, but I don’t think this is true for long. There are too many talented people working in this space who care enough to develop solutions to some really difficult problems that blockchains are perfect for.
People have been saying that exact thing for over a decade now, and there still has not been a single compelling use case outside of conducting illegal (or fraudulent) activity. A decade's worth of work from talented, enthusiastic people turning up nothing of substance should serve as evidence that blockchains are not, in fact, going to provide anything revolutionary.
You couldn’t be more wrong about what you are saying. Bitcoin has zero long term answers for what happens when the block reward isn’t enough to secure the blockchain in the future.
apologies, this is non-sense. this is what transaction fees are for. the gradual reduction in coinbase incentivizes miners to charge for transactions, and the desire for transaction completion incentivizes clients to pay for them.
the paper you linked hand-waves away this for some reason, either to suggest that interest in bitcoin is purely speculative (which to be fair would only be half-wrong), or ignoring that market forces put upward pressure on transaction fee cost.
One of the core strengths of Bitcoin is in dynamic difficulty adjustment. If there are fewer people mining then the difficulty to mine new blocks will automatically decrease, which will in turn increase the value/revenue per block. And vice versa in the case where there are more people mining. So regardless of the state of the market, you will always reach an equilibrium point where it will be profitable.
The one asterisk that needs to be added here of course is that with sufficiently low difficulty, a double spend attack becomes more viable, but this is a somewhat overblown threat. It's low reward, extremely high cost, and 'easily' undone if the market so agrees. It shouldn't be ignored, because it is indeed a threat, but at the same it's also kind of a 'meh' threat.
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edit: And for those who are may not be aware. Even once the final Bitcoin is mined, miners will continue mining - something which may be counter-intuitive. Whoever mines the block will get no coins, but will get all revenue from the fees attached to whichever transactions are processed.
because i expect miners to not operate at a loss. they can address this by either turning off their miners (which is most likely to occur when coinbase dominates the block payment amount), or by charging more to process transactions.
I expect on-chain transactions will eventually be extremely high-value, between major players and institutions willing to pay the fees, while the daily transactions will be on sidechains/other layers.
I'm not sure the fees will actually change a whole lot if denominated in BTC. I just expect that when 1 BTC is worth a lot more than it is now in fiat, people won't be paying for their coffee on-chain (assuming inflation doesn't do crazy things to the price of a cup of coffee!).
I sort of had a similar story, started mining mid-2014 and went "all in" after Doge was born, for a couple months. LTS I sold all my doges in the following years, the last of which just a couple months before Elon decided to tweet about Doge and skyrocket the price.
Well, that sure is an entertaining read. I can't imagine what the struggle was. Back then I would do ridiculous small bets on rising crypto coins and feel extremely stress, I can't imagine what you've been through...
I didn't keep any, but I also don't regret it. I would have sold them many times over on the way to those peaks. I do nowadays HODL some coins no matter where the price goes but these were purchased via fiat during the last year or so.
well shit, I'm also not a financial genius myself, had a huge opportunity to buy a lot of eth in 2016 and was like meh. So now I'm back to wageslaving.
I have a similar story (albeit at a much smaller scale). Around 2017 when you could still mine eth-derived altcoins feasibly with a GPU, I repurposed my old gaming PC into a mining rig with a few old cards. I took off the side and taped a box fan to it to provide air-flow [1]. My apartment at the time was $950 flat, all utilities included, zero language about max usage in my lease, so effectively whatever I mined was 100% profit.
I wasn't making much, maybe $50/mo at absolute peak? I'm sure if I had scaled up the property manager would have eventually wondered why/who was spiking the apartment building's electrical bill and I would have found the limit to my unit's "unlimited" electricity. But it was a fun project. I was working a full time job too, so I learned a lot about remote managing something like that. I had it all wired up with a VPN so I could SSH into the mining box from my phone. Here's another pic of my "workstation" at the time. The right hand monitor was my "status dashboard", really just a tmux session with htop, iftop, eth miner, etc... [2].
I was ~25 and single at the time and the biggest obstacle to 100% uptime was actually if I wanted to bring guests or dates over, they would wonder why there was a jet engine in the corner of my studio apt. So I would shut it down in that case. Eventually that + loss of profitability + general jankyness of the setup led me to dismantling it. But it was fun while it lasted. The part in the OP about restarting the box with a screwdriving short definitely spoke to me. My box had a whole ritual around restarts that I discovered through trial and error, where I would power up, pull the plug, restart, restart again, and then it would run stable indefinitely. Good times.
So tons of energy (and mental energy) was wasted, graphics cards were hoarded and abused, and in the end nothing of value was gained. Sounds like crypto to me :)
I'm glad the author took some positive experience from it though. There is something "fun", or at least gratifying, about going all in on something even when it puts you through hell.
When there's a gold rush, the only ones really profiting are the ones selling shovels.
Who won in the whole arms race? Hardware manufacturers, and people who could either run arbitrage or steal resources. (Which is which was often a matter of perspective.) Everyone else? Break-even or worse.
What was actually built, for all that effort? Almost nothing. What did we gain as a society? The same.
And I'm not sure that dollar-denominated financial markets are really any different.
You can't undervalue the education received for this experience. The point is to try and fail at as many thing as possible if you are truly leaning from them.
No problem. I would love to read more about your stories. Have a blog somewhere? The gifs just really distracted from the interesting content. I think simple images from these gifs would do the job as well, or a short video - which can be smaller in filesize than gifs, I read somewhere - that I can pause.
The link in this post is my blog, it's just that it's my only post so far. Probably gonna post non-crypto related stuff there too, but feel free to follow.
I had a similar story, mining bitcoin with fpgas, litecoins with gpus and energy for free in a student dorm. I could however pack it in a free room in the dorm. Nobody cared about it. I did around 20 bitcoins, but sold almost everything before it hit 500 euro/coin, because my girlfriend got pregnant and we needed an apartment. I held 3 coins, that after the network split with Bitcoin cash, was doubled. I ended up selling them well.. I still have 5000 peercoins, since the idea was great, and I was able to mine and mint them well, but unfortunately it never became the thing.. Maybe one day, I get rich. For now, I just was able to buy a small apartment with my 3 BTCs..
I hate when cryptomining is described as "solving extremely complex mathematical problems." That makes it sound like math professors gathering around a conference table burning the midnight oil trying to crack a formula when in reality it's just trying to crack a safe by randomly guessing the code over and over again - nothing complex about it.
I get your point, the calculations are generally just arithmetic, but there are in fact many cryptologist who spend a lot of time and effort understanding these algorithms and finding ways to "crack" them.
First gold rush was in summer 2011, when GPU mining was invented, Bitcoin hit $17, first articles appeared in mass media, and Radeon 5XXX cards suddenly vanished from computer stores.
If you want to become rich, take advantage of what comes for free and sell it. For this guy, it was welfare and free electricity. For others, it is healthy soil, or rich natural resources.
Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you?
I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy!
We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps.
A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network.
I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.
The uni I attended did indeed have an "all you can eat" buffet, and strong-armed dorm residents into overpurchasing meal plans. Students swiping in people experiencing homelessness to expend their otherwise-forfeit meal credits was a relatively common sight.
A visitor charging their phone? Ignore it. A resident running an extension cord to the carpark to charge the car of a different visitor every day? Enforce it.
Don't ask bad-faith questions like this. There's nothing gained by arguing the extremes of a case.
My entire point was asking whether there is an acceptable use/abuse policy, and providing an anecdote about how there was no policy in place for a similar kind of "hack" that I did.
You're just asserting that there is some kind of policy, without providing any details of it. Since you're arguing from a point of knowledge, it isn't bad faith to ask you about your knowledge of the policy of the unnamed dorm at the unnamed college attended by the unnamed friend.
I don't believe you actually know anything about the policies of the dorm - I think you're just assuming there is some policy, and it was reasonable in 2013.
> As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity.
My favorite crypto miner story was from a guy who caught an employee hiding ASIC miners above the ceiling tiles in their office. For some reason he thought nobody would notice. They noticed both the noise and the weird new devices on the network.
I suspect he lost more money from getting fired than he gained from the crypto mining. His miners were offline for quite a long time while they were seized as evidence in the ensuing investigation, too.
This is just at the beginning of the story to be fair. Later on he is mining in his living place and also writes about the electrity cost needing to be covered by the mining revenue.
The universities also very quickly banned crypto mining in dormitories. People still did it secretly, but it was very easy to get caught. There would have been no way to have any sizeable operations in a dorm.
A friend and I managed to run a PS3 cluster mining bitcoins in one of the labs on campus for pretty much the entire 2009 academic year. But I think that was before mining rigs became much of a nuisance.
The first Bitcoin difficulty adjustment happened on Dec 30 2009. Which means that for entirety of year 2009 there was on average just one computer mining Bitcoins.
Not really a stretch. I have a similar story that I can attribute to 2009/2010 (attempting to mine on the person's computer I was living with at the time)
Was just sharing my experience with the topic really. Tbh, building a PS3 supercomputer was one of the most educational experiences I had during my time at university. If they didn’t have an 11 figure endowment I might almost feel bad about it.
Edit: Also, I absolutely didn’t get rich from this if that’s what you’re concerned about for some reason. We cashed out after an early price spike, pocketing several thousand dollars each, which with both considered to be a major windfall.
Considering the typical behavior of about 90% or more of all major tech companies that many people on this site work for or contract to, it's laughable that you'd snark at someone talking about a minor pseudo-theft of electricity form a dorm room several years ago. Hell, much of the shit being thrown by commentators on this site on cryptominers, who often use renewable energy sources for their mining, is itself laughable considering how much electricity and resources the mega tech corps they work for burn all the time. You could argue that said companies do so for "better" reasons, but that's debatable and a separate matter.
Those who end up amassing fortunes have often ruthlessly exploited the loopholes of unwritten rules - Peter Thiel taking advantage of Roth IRA, Uber and AirBnB dumping the externalities of unregulated taxis and hotels on the wider society, Walmart putting its lowest paid staff on medicaid etc. Just look at Panama papers to see how the rich exploit all the loopholes to save on taxes.
Seems unlikely, given that this story was told from the perspective of someone mining in the pre-ASIC era. I suppose they could have invested in ASICs early on, but they started as a broke student and the reason the story is fun is because they made it work on a shoestring. "And then I bought $200,000 worth of ASICs in an overseas datacenter" doesn't have the same effect.
Probably more so by "hodling" instead of immediately selling to buy more hardware, or selling half for hardware and holding the other half to split the risk between the two option.
But it's easy to be smart after the fact...
"so I'm mining monero to heat my apartment this winter" ... "My ceiling is now on fire"