Oh, the irony!
Just had a power failure while writing this post, I was going to kill somebody if the ups would have failed and lost it.
For those who replied negatively, listen, it's probably just a prototype showing that it could be done. Because why not, right?
Because scaling is a b1tch!
What works for a hobby miner it becomes impossible to run when you multiply it by a dozen.
1 S9? I can run it in my bathroom! 20? I will turn off the power on the street, my neighbors will call the police and I won't be able to hear even 10 cops cars over the noise, and probably from the heat my bathtub will melt before they arrive!
Same here, you got enough power for 5kw miners, how do you get the cheap or zero cooking oil for more?
It's like living on soda cans, you can pick a few hundred each day but can you pick 10 000 a day? Scaling!
How tho? I can't see how mining is a game changer for low-income countries, if the miner generates enough money for them it means the cost of buying and running that miner is also high with respect to their income, someone who lives in a rich country can save enough money in a week to buy a used miner for $500 without having to starve, someone in a poor country will need to work for months and months to afford that same miner.
I've seen this so many times I kind of stopped paying attention to it!
Somehow magically investing $200 to get $200 is great in Somalia and investing $5000 to get $5000 is bad in the US or EU, don't know by what logic, don't know how this keeps getting spotted even if it's not simply about mining but about investing too, like some guy who can barely afford 20$ will strike it rich unlike the one affording $5000 cause....reasons!
As for these folks using cooking oil or whatever shit -- none of these methods are sustainable or feasible, you may come up with whatever way of generating electricity, but as long as the other folks can generate it a lot cheaper by burning coal or gas, it makes no sense, you are essentially competing against every other miner, whoever finds a way to make the cheapest electricity will win in the long run.
It will work only on a small scale.
For example, at our farm, we harvest willows and combine it with straws to make pellets, we sell those but we could fire them up and power a generator, it would work for us on our production but if we try to get over that, buying it or investing in planting more trees more land would bring the cost of home generation over the grid costs, and we're talking EU grid prices!
This, and allow me to quote you, "whatever shit' is just meme material!
Love the "Kaboom" sign on that fence!
Now the U.S is taking the lead, who else can compete against them now that China is gone? Russia, Russia has a lot of money and cheap power, how cheap?
How cheap and, more importantly, how much!
Cause you can have cheap energy for industries like Iceland, but there are only 18Twh of them overall, The US has 4000Twh!
For example, I was recently in Kosovo, with someone who had very very cheap electricity. He collects the cheapest ASICs possible, and has been accumulating them for a long time (several years). This gives him an income that's not insignificant back home (minimum wage more or less 200 EUR in Kosovo if I'm not wrong). Of course, we're not talking about mining on an industrial scale, but what I was trying to say is that over the long term, some people manage to obtain a small amount of sats that is not insignificant in proportion to their country's minimum income.
That's exactly what Mikey said also, he invested 100$ to get a few satoshi and earn 20$ extra per month, now if that miner fails...
Fliping burgers 100km away in Sofia and he will be better!