Originally published at: How to heat your chickens (and your home) with Bitcoin | Boing Boing
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Next step is to power the miners with on site power generation.
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Methane from the chicken poop?
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Abolish Bitcoin
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Honestly, if you were going to use a space-heater instead, this is fine. I’d prefer they be running FaH or something else societally-useful rather than bitcoin, though.
Doubt the huge bitcoin farms recycle the heat in any useful way, so kill those off please.
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Coop heaters are controversial. They have a tendency to work great until they don’t and then you have a burnt coop, dead chickens, and a horrible plastic smell you can’t get rid of.
13-year-old me is enthused by the idea that power suppliers could make space heaters and boilers where the heating element is a 2kW chunk of bitcoin-mining computronium, which transmits its mined coins back to the power company through the grid, and it automatically lets you heat your home for free. The arrangement could be standards-based so even if you pick up one of these heaters at a flea market in a different state, it just automatically works in your home.
But it still wouldn’t solve Bitcoin’s overall energy problem, because it would encourage people to waste heat, and for that matter, the power company would make more money by just putting all the heaters in a big swimming pool next to the power plant and keeping it at a rolling boil 24/7.
However you slice it, spending a single joule on Bitcoin mining is an abomination; there’s no amount of offsetting that could shift its moral balance sheet into the black.
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There may well be some model where it makes moral sense. Protein folding? Umm, not coming up with too many ideas.
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