This person in Austria ingeniously cools his cryptocurrency mining hardware with cold air sucked in from outside his house. And uses part of his cryptocurrency earnings to pay for his entire house’s electricity bill!
Here’s his commentary:
Some crypto currencies… are generated by thousands of people who run dedicated hardware to basically calculate random numbers until one cryptographically correct one is found.
Never mind how it works on a technical level, the main takeaway is that you can put some device in your house that uses electricity and produces heat. In exchange you get shares of that crypto currency coins like Ethereum or Bitcoin
Each of these cards are running at about 80°C (176°F). I can just harvest this heat and send it to my heatpump so it would need less energy warming the outside air. Since I’m only running the miner when it’s cold outside (and the price is high enough) I can use the cold, dry outside air to cool the miners and also recycling the warm air they produce to feed into the heat pump.
Success! I was able to lower my heat pump’s electricity needs by ~50% and half of the costs are also paid for by the mining earnings (My mining rig will stay profitable until the ETH price is at ~900$. Below that it’ll no longer match its own electricity bill. )