Bitcoin mining machines can be used as home heating equipment in winter

For Oles Slobodenyuk, CEO of Ukrainian mining machine manufacturer Hotmine, there is now a better option to market their bitcoin mining equipment: use it as a home heating device.

McY37BYgbPjKcqubF4CHY10jUzvHgPcO9HJ2MwtJ.jpeg Irkutsk is located in Eastern Siberia, and the winter is extremely cold, with temperatures below zero degrees being commonplace. So a few weeks ago, when Ors Slobodnyok took his Hotmine miner to the Baikal Lake Blockchain and Crypto Forum, he reluctantly made a joke about the weather:

"I was told that in Irkutsk the average temperature is minus two degrees Celsius, so I brought a radiator."

Of course, joking aside, Ors Slobodnyok finally told the attendees that Hotmine plans to sell up to 200,000 mining machines to local residents of Irkutsk, and sales may increase in the future. He said:

“Our goal is to effectively utilize the 80% of hot air generated by mining, which also protects the Bitcoin network itself. We also believe that mining should be more decentralized and every home should have a full node.”

However, Bitcoin mining is still too “centralized” at present. According to BTC.com data, the world’s four largest mining pools control 60% of the computing power, but Hotmine hopes to follow the Bitcoin philosophy and use economic incentives to achieve the ideal of decentralized mining.

According to Ors Slobodnyok, each Hotmine miner can mine with 8 TH/s computing power. According to the current Bitcoin price, 1TH/s generates a monthly income of approximately US$7.20, so each Hotmine mining machine owner can earn approximately US$56 per month, and can also solve the heating problem of a space of about 10 square meters at home.

In fact, the idea itself is not new - last year, a French company called "Qarnot" announced the launch of a CPU-based mining heater, but Hotmine is obviously more market-oriented. After all, Irkutsk is much colder than France.

Ols Slobodnyok revealed that the current local electricity price in Irkutsk is only $1-2 per kilowatt, which means that the monthly electricity bill for a heater is less than $10. With the income from Bitcoin mining, it is actually equivalent to free heating. Not only that, Ols Slobodnyok claimed that even if the Bitcoin block reward is halved (or the number of new Bitcoins awarded to miners is regularly reduced), it will not harm this business model.

“Keep it real”

Hotmine was founded in 2013 in a small village near Kiev. Ols Slobodnyok said he had designed a boiler prototype based on mining equipment, which allowed people to get free heating without considering Bitcoin, but in fact all cryptocurrencies were completed by them.

Two years later, the chips in the "boiler" aged and the mining industry was no longer profitable. If people wanted to continue using mining machines for heating, they had to pay some electricity bills. Eventually, people chose to switch back to wood stoves. This incident made Oles Slobodnyok realize that no matter how gorgeous the new technology is, it will not attract attention if it cannot save money.

Now, Hotmine is looking for partners to make metal casings and other peripherals for its heat-generating crypto mining machines. So far, three Russian companies have made offers for potential partnerships.

The company announced that the first batch of 60 mining machines with "heaters" will be released in November this year, hoping to test market demand, and the price of each device is expected to be $1,050. If all goes well, Hotmine should be able to sell 100-200 mining machines by the end of this year.

However, if customers learn how to handle Bitcoin wallets and how to trade Bitcoin on exchanges, it means that Hotmine may not get as much money. Regarding this issue, Ors Slobodnyok said that customers should not do this at the beginning. In addition, in order to deal with related issues, Hotmine will also cooperate with encryption service providers, and all consumers must provide a bank account before exchanging Bitcoin for legal currency.

More and more people are trying to use the heat generated by Bitcoin mining to keep warm

Ilyak Frolov, an Irkutsk resident, also believes that using the heat generated by Bitcoin mining can provide "free" heating, at least in places like Eastern Siberia, so he also founded a similar startup Imagine8.

The company immersed Bitmain's mining machines in mineral oil, which then transferred heat to the floor. To demonstrate the technology, Imagine8 plans to build a hotel heated by the mining machines.

Ilya Frolov has been working on how to use the heat emitted by mining machines since 2016. He and a school friend brought about two dozen people to test the "miner heater" in their homes on the outskirts of Irkutsk. Initially, Ilya Frolov asked homeowners to heat their homes with the system and send him the electricity bill. At first, homeowners had no problem with this model, but when they began to understand how Bitcoin worked, many people began to choose to mine directly.

According to Ilya Frolov, after paying for the hardware and installation, the homeowner learned how to handle wallets and exchange accounts and then focused on mining.

Of course, there are many customers who support Ilya Frolov's idea. The average house area of ​​local residents in Irkutsk is 100 square meters, and the electric boiler is heated by about 10 kilowatts, which means that the monthly electricity bill for each local household may reach hundreds of dollars. At this time, if six to eight ASIC mining machines are used, it can not only heat the whole family, but also earn some Bitcoin.

Ilya Frolov said that when the mining machines do double duty, the environment also benefits because the heat from the mining machines is not dissipated into the air, but used to keep people warm. Not only that, people will not choose to burn coal for heating, which also protects the environment.

On the other hand, as more and more people see that mining machine heating is "profitable", many companies have begun to try and explore similar technologies. Some people bought mining machines and mineral oil after watching the introduction video released by Ilya Frolov and tried to build their own systems.