Home Mining and Heat Reuse

Attakai - Making Home Mining Possible and Accessible!

Heat your home while mining bitcoins

Attakai - Making Home Mining Possible and Accessible!

Why reuse the heat from an ASIC?
The added value for Bitcoin

Attakai, which means "the ideal temperature" in Japanese, is the name of the initiative aimed at discovering bitcoin mining through heat reuse launched by @ajelexBTC and @jimzap21 with Découvre Bitcoin. This ASIC retrofitting guide will serve as a basis for learning more about mining, its operation, and the underlying economy by demonstrating the possibility of adapting a Bitcoin miner for use as a radiator in homes. This offers more comfort and savings, allowing participants to receive non-KYC BTC cash back on their electric heating bill.

Bitcoin automatically adjusts the mining difficulty and rewards miners for their participation. However, the concentration of hashrate can pose risks to the network's neutrality. Using Bitcoin's computing power for heating solutions directly benefits the network itself by increasing the distribution of computing power.

Why reuse the heat from an ASIC?

It is important to understand the relationship between energy and heat production in an electrical system.

For an investment of 1 kW of electrical energy, an electric radiator produces 1 kW of heat, no more, no less. New radiators are not more efficient than traditional radiators. Their advantage lies in their ability to continuously and evenly distribute heat throughout a room, providing greater comfort compared to traditional radiators that alternate between high heating power and no heating, thereby generating regular temperature variations and discomfort.

A computer, or more broadly, an electronic board, does not consume energy to perform calculations; it simply needs energy to flow through its components to function. Energy consumption is due to the electrical resistance of the components, which produces losses and generates heat, known as the Joule effect.

Some companies have developed the concept of combining computing power needs with heating needs through a radiator/server. The idea is to distribute a company's servers into small units that could be placed in homes or offices. However, this idea faces several problems. The need for servers is not related to the need for heating, and companies cannot use the computing capabilities of their servers flexibly. There are also limits to the bandwidth that individuals can have. All these constraints prevent the company from making these expensive installations profitable or providing a stable online server offering without data centers that can take over when heating is not needed.

The heat generated by your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home. If you use electric heating where you live, then the heat from your computer is not wasted. It costs the same to generate this heat with your computer. If you have a cheaper heating system than electric heating, then the waste is only in the cost difference. If it's summer and you use air conditioning, then it's double the waste. Bitcoin mining should occur where it is more cost-effective. Perhaps it will be a location with a cold climate, where heating is provided by electricity, and where mining will become cost-free. Satoshi Nakamoto - August 8, 2010

Bitcoin and its proof-of-work system stand out because they automatically adjust the mining difficulty based on the amount of computation performed by the entire network. This amount is referred to as the "hashrate" and is expressed in hashes per second. Today, it is estimated to be 380 exahashes per second, which is equivalent to 380 billion billion hashes per second. This hashrate represents work and, therefore, an amount of energy expended. The higher the hashrate, the higher the difficulty, and vice versa. Thus, a Bitcoin miner can be activated or deactivated at any time without affecting the network, unlike radiators/servers that need to remain stable to provide their service. The miner is rewarded for their participation, relative to others, no matter how small it may be.

In summary, both an electric radiator and a Bitcoin miner produce 1 kW of heat for every 1 kW of electricity consumed. However, the miner also receives bitcoins as a reward. Regardless of the price of electricity, the price of bitcoin, or the competition in Bitcoin mining activity on the network, it is economically more advantageous to heat with a miner rather than an electric radiator.

The added value for Bitcoin

What is important to understand is how mining contributes to the decentralization of the Bitcoin network. Several existing technologies have been ingeniously combined to bring Nakamoto's consensus to life. This consensus economically rewards honest participants for their contribution to the operation of the Bitcoin network, while discouraging dishonest participants. This is one of the key points that allows the network to exist sustainably. Honest actors, those who mine according to the rules, are all competing with each other to obtain the largest possible share of the reward for producing new blocks. This economic incentive naturally leads to a form of centralization as companies choose to specialize in this lucrative activity by reducing their costs through economies of scale. These industrial actors have an advantageous position for purchasing and maintaining machines, as well as negotiating wholesale electricity rates.

At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network, and the rest of the LAN connects to that node. Satoshi Nakamoto - November 2, 2008

Certain entities hold a considerable percentage of the total hashrate in large mining farms. We can observe the recent cold wave in the United States, where a significant portion of the hashrate was taken offline to redirect energy to households with an exceptional need for electricity. For several days, miners were economically incentivized to shut down their farms, and this exceptional weather is reflected in the Bitcoin hashrate curve.

This issue could become problematic and poses a significant risk to the network's neutrality. An actor with more than 51% of the hashrate could more easily censor transactions if they wished. That is why it is important to distribute the hashrate among multiple actors rather than centralized entities that could be more easily seized by a government, for example.

If miners are distributed in thousands, or even millions, of households around the world, it becomes very difficult for a state to take control of them.

When it comes out of the factory, a miner is not suitable for use as a heater in a home, due to two main problems: excessive noise and lack of adjustment. However, these problems can be easily solved through hardware and software modifications, allowing for a significantly quieter miner that can be configured and automated, much like modern electric heaters.

Attakaï is an educational initiative that teaches you how to retrofit the Antminer S9 in the most cost-effective way.

This is an excellent opportunity to learn by practicing while being rewarded for your participation with KYC-free satoshis.