Has The Cold Weather Got You Down, How About A Nice Warm GPU?

It’s winter, the nights are long, the wind is cold, and everything is looking a bit bleak. Your heating bills are probably through the roof, overall, it's quite a grim outlook. However, things may be about to change… well the weather doesn’t look like it will, but how does a cryptocurrency mining heater sound? Crazy, right? Well, today, French start-up company; Qarnot, unveiled a new bespoke heater for use in any domestic setting, the unique selling point of this heater, however, is that it contains a smal10l computer, optimized for coin mining. The premise of this technology is that any data centre or computer does emit a large amount of heat, Qarnot has decided to use this to their advantage.

The heater, named QC1 simply plugs into the network via ethernet, then the user simply adds their cryptocurrency wallet address to the QC1’s mobile app, what this means is that in theory, the heater is able to mine any type of cryptocurrency, it just uses a simple Linux interface, therefore just so long as a valid wallet address is supplied within the accompanying mobile app. The hardware is composed of two GPU’s, designed to mine at 60MH/s, as the GPU’s are activated, heat is generated. Traditional heating elements are also built into the body of the QC1, just to ensure adequate heat is generated. Quarnot also claims that the technology does not take any currency from the users, there is no commission for the company and therefore, any coins you mine are yours to keep. According to Techcrunch “With the current price of Ethereum, Qarnot says you can expect to mine around $120.00 per month”. This, however, does not consider bills generated from the power used by the heater. Ultimately though, any heater you use in your home will increase your energy bills, so really, I can’t see this being a problem. Unfortunately, Qarnot has priced the QC1 at around $3600.00, meaning purchasing one, or a couple might require some sturdy investment. Once it’s running though, at Ethereum’s current price, after 30 months the heater will have paid for itself. Obviously, this is a naive prediction considering that cryptocurrency prices fluctuate, you get the idea though. I absolutely love this, it’s a novel idea that has some hot implications (pardon the pun). Using the heat generated by coin-mining is one thing but building this technology into everyday items really does add a very creative element to the coin-mining industry, if standard computers and laptops are freed up by these new wave coin-mining machines, who knows what sort of processing power could be generated. I think this is something we need to keep our eyes on, before you know it, your kettle might be coin-mining every time you make a brew, wouldn’t that be nice?