There is one legitimate way to generate bitcoins without increasing your electricity bill. It only works if you are currently using resistive electric heating to heat your house.
In that case you turn off your electric heaters and start up a bank of computers generating bitcoins. The computers perform the computation, then release 100% of the electrical energy as heat, so you get exactly the same amount of electrical heating for your money, but the heat came as the waste product of computation which is then effectively free of cost.
In that case you turn off your electric heaters and start up a bank of computers generating bitcoins. The computers perform the computation, then release 100% of the electrical energy as heat, so you get exactly the same amount of electrical heating for your money, but the heat came as the waste product of computation which is then effectively free of cost.
The problem is that heating by resistor elements is not the most efficient way of heating. Heat pumps are more profitable.
I was wondering about that. But where does the energy go besides heat? There isn't any motion or light.
REsistive heating is 100% efficient, but heat pumps are 200% to 350% heat efficient. They literally pump the heat from a cold space to a warmer space in the way a water pump pushes water from the bottom of the hill to the top; from a lower energy potiential to a higher energy potential.
However, they also lose their advantages quickly with an increasing temp gap, so in colder climates they are not particularly efficient. They work best in temperate climates that don't spend more than 20 to 30 days below freezing a year. They wouldn't effect the guy who lives in Canada|Siberia who has to heat his home anyway and has no access to cheaper heat such as natural gas or nuclear municipal heat. It's this guy that heating with Bitcoin generation that will be generating even when it is not profitable.
In colder climates heat exchanger is installed where temperature is always high - in the well depth of approximately 200 meters. Heat pump always profitable in operation but not always given the complexity of installation.
