Some Americans Are Trying to Heat Their Homes With Bitcoin Mining (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0180099549
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/16/2339215/some-americans-are-trying-to-heat-their-homes-with-bitcoin-mining
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/16/bitcoin-crypto-mining-home-heating-energy-bills.html
> [T]he computing power of crypto mining generates a lot of heat, most which just ends up vented into the air. According to digital assets brokerage, K33, the bitcoin mining industry [2]generates about 100 TWh of heat annually — enough to heat all of Finland.This energy waste within a very [3]energy-intense industry is leading entrepreneurs to look for ways to repurpose the heat for homes, offices, or other locations, especially in colder weather months.
>
> During a frigid snap earlier this year, [4]The New York Times reviewed HeatTrio, a $900 space heater that also doubles as a bitcoin mining rig. Others use the heat from their own in-home cryptocurrency mining to spread warmth throughout their house. "I've seen bitcoin rigs running quietly in attics, with the heat they generate rerouted through the home's ventilation system to offset heating costs. It's a clever use of what would otherwise be wasted energy," said Jill Ford, CEO of Bitford Digital, a sustainable bitcoin mining company based in Dallas... "Same price as heating the house, but the perk is that you are mining bitcoin," Ford said...
>
> The crypto-heated future may be unfolding in the town of Challis, Idaho, where Cade Peterson's company, Softwarm, is repurposing bitcoin heat to ward off the winter. Several shops and businesses in town are experimenting with Softwarm's rigs to mine and heat. At TC Car, Truck and RV Wash, Peterson says, the owner was spending $25 a day to heat his wash bays to melt snow and warm up the water. "Traditional heaters would consume energy with no returns. They installed bitcoin miners and it produces more money in bitcoin than it costs to run," Peterson said. Meanwhile, an industrial concrete company is offsetting its $1,000 a month bill to heat its 2,500-gallon water tank by heating it with bitcoin. Peterson has heated his own home for two-and-a-half years using bitcoin mining equipment and believes that heat will power almost everything in the future. "You will go to Home Depot in a few years and buy a water heater with a data port on it and your water will be heated with bitcoin," Peterson said.
Derek Mohr, clinical associate professor at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, remains skeptical.
> Bitcoin mining is so specialized now that a home computer, or even network of home computers, would have almost zero chance of being helpful in mining a block of bitcoin, according to Mohr, with mining farms use of specialized chips that are created to mine bitcoin much faster than a home computer... "The bitcoin heat devices I have seen appear to be simple space heaters that use your own electricity to heat the room..."
CNBC also spoke to Andrew Sobko, founder of Argentum AI (which is building a marketplace for sharing computing power), who says the idea makes the most sense in larger settings. "We're working with partners who are already redirecting compute heat into building heating systems and even agricultural greenhouse warming. That's where the economics and environmental benefits make real sense. Instead of trying to move the heat physically, you move the compute closer to where that heat provides value."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/16/bitcoin-crypto-mining-home-heating-energy-bills.html
[2] https://k33.com/research
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/bitcoin-miner-cleanspark-crypto-mining-energy-power-ai-data-center.html
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/heatbit-space-heater-review/
I almost do that... (Score:5, Funny)
I run GIMPS (the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) in colder months, so the additional 100-200 W from my PC running full produces additional heat the cat signals she enjoys, and as a plus I factor large numbers.
Re:I almost do that... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not run Folding@Home? At least that produces meaningful results. Factoring the largest prime number will not, in any way, help humanity, science, or math, and is an even worse waste of power than mining crypto (which at least helps keep the network/blockchain secured)
Re: (Score:3)
Admitting that I made the same mistake elsewhere years ago, one cannot factor a "largest prime number".
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not into math so i don't really care about that nuance, but the fact that computing primes of any variety is a waste of energy.
Re: (Score:2)
That's only because there is no largest prime number. It's trivial to factor any prime number. The tricky part is proving that a number is prime.
Re: (Score:2)
I can launch Folding@Home next time. However in the Prime numbers vs. blockchain I do favour the prime numbers.
The calculations of blockchain are entirely senseless, in that they will vanish in time when the blockchain technology is phased out and replaced by something else. (I personally have no interest in helping the blockchain.)
Prime, known non-prime and known factored numbers will stay engraved in stone for the foreseeable future. We only need to compute them once. M1277 (2^1277-1) is an intriguingly "
Re: (Score:2)
That's too many numbers, some of them gotta be made up
Re: (Score:2)
Could also run some World Community Grid tasks on BOINC, that's what I do.
But if you just want to heat your house nothing beats a heat pump for efficiency.
Re: (Score:2)
I got my gas heater installed for $1000. At 60c/therm it beats resistive heaters by a huge margin in efficiency/$ . Same guy quoted a heat pump for heat but it was like 15k. It wouldn't amortize in my ownership period, so made zero sense.
and get hit with an capital gains tax bill / fine (Score:2)
and get hit with an capital gains tax bill / fine if you don't do all the paper work right.
Re: and get hit with an capital gains tax bill / f (Score:1)
If spend it you've converted it to fiat essentially. So you are liable for the taxes and probably some sort of fraud. If you simply hold it , you don't pay taxes until until you sell OR pay for something. If under $5000 (may be more now), you can say it's a hobby. But , I'd play by the rules. It'd suck to be made an example of for $5001 and go to prison.
What's old is new again/using wasted space (Score:3)
When I demoted my single Pentium 4 rig to workshop use
it noticeably raised winter temperature inside my
sealed 40ft High Cube shipping container machine shop.
It's not difficult to rack or shelve many computers near the ceiling or hang them off walls. I hang a 1U server off the wall of my office as one would a painting (and could cover it with a painting if I cared). Total cost is a couple of small lag hooks costing less than a dollar.
I don't do mini/tiny PCs for space reasons because there is more than enough unused space in most rooms to make that unnecessary, and for access a computer on the wall is hard to beat. Needing no desk my server doesn't clutter mine.
If I wanted mining rigs I could line walls with them high enough not to interfere with anything else with heating as a bonus.
Re: (Score:2)
noise ;) been there, get 10-15 servers running in the shop rack and you don't want to work in there. It is that electronic, toasty warm in winter ;)
Unclear on the concept... (Score:2)
Derek Mohr, clinical associate professor at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, ... "The bitcoin heat devices I have seen appear to be simple space heaters that use your own electricity to heat the room..."
WTF is a "clinical associate professor?" Another term for an idiot? If you heat with electricity, running a mining rig makes perfect sense, any energy used ends up as heat. Better to have a Bitcoin mining rig generating it than a nichrome wire.
Re: (Score:2)
Mining hardware would be a lot more expensive than a simple heater. And if a meaningful number of people started to do it then the BTC return would tank.
Re: (Score:2)
The BTC return has already tanked.
Re:Unclear on the concept... (Score:4, Insightful)
> Better to have a Bitcoin mining rig generating it than a nichrome wire.
The problem is that the mining hardware costs more than the amount it of Bitcoin it will ever generate in a reasonable amount of years, even if you're getting your electricity for free.
Realistically, this is one of those rare occasions where the first post nailed it - if you need heat, it's hard to beat the bang for your buck from a heat pump. Except maybe with one of those cheap Chinese diesel heaters, if somehow you have access to free fuel [1]like this guy. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShKGmv1kb4
Re: (Score:2)
Whoosh. They were comparing mining to space heaters, not heat pumps, which I readily admit are a more efficient source of electric heat. And if mining rigs didn't pay for themselves (where do you think new Bitcoin comes from?), no one would buy them (except other idiot "clinical associate professors").
Re: (Score:2)
> And if mining rigs didn't pay for themselves (where do you think new Bitcoin comes from?), no one would buy them (except other idiot "clinical associate professors").
If you pay normal US utility rates for electricity, you presently can't mine Bitcoin profitably. You're just effectively buying coinage through your power bill, on top of whatever you paid for the mining hardware. As per the article, this just results in slightly discounted heat , and there are better ways of achieving that end.
As to where new Bitcoin comes from, the amount of Bitcoin mined always stays the same regardless of the number of miners participating. The concept of having lots of people all att
Re: (Score:2)
the mining difficulty automatically adjusting itself in response to changes in total network hashrate.
I thought the difficulty increased monotonically. If the number of miners went down, would it really be easier to mine?
Re: (Score:2)
> If the number of miners went down, would it really be easier to mine?
There's an interesting chart [1]here [blockchain.com] showing the relationship between the market value and the mining hashrate. Less people mining does cause the difficulty to drop, but realistically we're talking small fluctuations - not anything that would suddenly make this gimmick of a heater profitable.
[1] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/hash-rate
Re: (Score:2)
My initial instinct was to scold you for "WTF is a clinical associate professor?" as thats a term that makes perfect sense for a teaching hospital.
But this dude is an economist? What sort of clinic would an economist work in, particularly an economist who specializes in crypto shit.
Though it does remind me of a story from the early bitcoin era of a guy who built a mining rig in his bedroom, and it heated the room so much he collapsed from heat-stroke and ended up in hospital with brain damage. Which I've ne
Re: (Score:2)
My initial instinct was to scold you for "WTF is a clinical associate professor?" as thats a term that makes perfect sense for a teaching hospital
"School of Business". They're obviously way outside their bailiwick. Probably a failed MBA. Mencken: "Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach."
Do they make enough? (Score:1)
Do they make enough to cover the cost of the heater and electricity? Does it make much of a difference at least? Are these heaters going to become targeted devices for hackers?
The "Bitcoin heater" is (mostly) snake oil (Score:2)
According to the article:
> The Heatbit Trio is basically a CPU with a radiant-heating coil stacked on top of it. On “eco” mode, it uses just 400 watts of electricity to power that little internal computer, which simultaneously runs the cryptomining calculations and also cranks out roughly the same, equivalent heating power.
So, you've got 400 watts of Bitcoin-generating heat, and the remainder of the heat is provided by a standard resistive heating element if you actually want the amount of BTUs that you'd typically get from a standard 1,500w portable space heater.
> During an average eight-hour workday, I spent about 75 on electricity and typically earned a total of around 0.0000014 Bitcoin (BTC) per day. Based on the current value of Bitcoin, that’s roughly the equivalent of 14
Oh boy. So, let's ask our favorite LLM how long that'd take to pay for itself with the "savings" from mining Bitcoin. It estimated 54 years, running the heater for 8 hours every day in the winter. The good news is you'd have your 50-year-m
Re: (Score:2)
all portable electric space heaters generally put out the same 1,500w
It really doesn't matter what they put out, all resistive heaters are 100% efficient (any inefficiency would result in heat anyway).
Are people buying new miners? Where does new Bitcoin come from - already amortized ones? Still, if that's what you have, it's better the heat from them than from a resistive element.
I don't see where marketing heat from a miner is any worse than the "Amish space heaters" which sell for $500 and make
Re: (Score:2)
> It really doesn't matter what they put out, all resistive heaters are 100% efficient (any inefficiency would result in heat anyway).
The idea being that a $70 1,500w heater isn't any better than a $20 1,500w heater, at least as far as producing heat goes. The more expensive ones might have a more accurate thermostat or produce less noise, but none of the typical resistance heaters sold at big box retailers give you any extra heat for your buck (damn those pesky laws of physics).
> I don't see where marketing heat from a miner is any worse than the "Amish space heaters" which sell for $500 and make invalid claims about having better efficiency than a $40 milk house heater.
It depends entirely on if you consider the $900 for the Bitcoin heater a sunk cost, and also the fact that you're only actually getting 400w of heat from the Bit
Wrong Algorithm (Score:2)
Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.
If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).
You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts,
Re: (Score:2)
In this case they can buy old ASICs and run those since they're just running them as resistive heaters. Any BTC they mine is just icing on the cake. Still sucks compared to a heat pump but whatever.
For the love of $DEITY, why not a heat pump? (Score:2)
For the love of $DEITY, why not just use a heat pump? It takes a fraction of the energy cost to move the heat, compared to generating it. If it is too cold, then by all means, use another heat source, but save the electrical heat for the actual cold weather.
Ideally, once it is too cold for a heat pump, one should go with natural gas, propane, or a fuel, just because it puts out more energy than electric and puts less stress on the grid. What would be ideal is having gas furnaces use the heat differential
Why not house the homeless in datacenters? (Score:1)
Or next to them?
Re: (Score:2)
Many of the homeless are drug addicts that would be happy to rip up the interior of a datacentre and sell it for scrap.
Americans Catching Up (Score:2)
They've had coin-operated heaters in England for years.
That's quite an old idea (Score:2)
qarnot computing has been doing that for about a decade.
The more things change, the more the same thing... (Score:1)
Fun fact -- In the late 1980s, after Cray Research Inc moved it's OS development team into a new facility, they had considerable difficulty divesting themselves of the old development building at 1440 Mendota Heights road, Mendota Heights, MN, because in spite of being located in one of the coldest locations in the contiguous 48 states, it had been heated pretty much entirely by the waste heat from the multi-megawatt supercomputers in its own datacenter.
Stupid (Score:2)
I canâ(TM)t even begin to describe how stupid this is.
Re: (Score:1)
Why? I mine Dictatorcoin AND Fartcoin every day by strenuously pedalling my soul cycle whilst saluting the flag and eating more raw beans than Cowboy Neal. Now Im proper toasty all day long, my legs are ripped and my voice is sexier than RFK Jr! Everyone nose ozone holes are a Canadian conspiracy!
Right on cue (Score:2)
[1]As expected [slashdot.org] of Slashddot.
[1] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23845594&cid=65796402
How about using a heat pump? (Score:4, Interesting)
I use one and normally get a cop of 3 or 4 !!! So with a COP of 4, with 250Watts of electricity, I get 1000Watts of heatingâ¦. But no bitcoins
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, don't let your filthy facts get in the way of a shitcoin puff piece.
Re: How about using a heat pump? (Score:2)
Heat pump > natural gas > Bitcoin miner > space heater.
Re: (Score:2)
The absolute optimal would be transporting the miners to a cold location every season change of the year. (The trick would be, making sure they're not destroyed by the renter, and constant re-buying of hardware as things not only break, but miners age and get old and uncompetitive.) That's also assuming the person you're renting it from gives it back, you'd need a huge down payment to try and avoid this, making it only affordable to already rich people.
Re: (Score:2)
> The absolute optimal would be transporting the miners to a cold location
What, like the Fort Knox Mine in Fairbanks? I'm sure they'd be OK to work there if you paid them well, just remember that it's open pit when you post the job applications.