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That's interesting. If you have no screen on then all of the energy spent is converted to heat right? So if you are heating the place anyway it is costless?
To a point, yes. The trick is knowing where that point of dimishishing returns begins, and how it varies.
Heh, so bitcoins will be a cold climate manufactured good, lol.
It already is. I know from private conversations that a statisticly significant number of long-time forum members are Canadians. At least one of whom has been selling off last winter's heat bill. If there are more people who generate bitcoins in the northern hemisphere (which is almost certainly the case) one would expect to see a seasonal component to the difficulty. At least once the difficultly reaches a mature balance in the future. This is an effect that several of those distributed.net type people have noticed before. Their overall computational power trends slightly up during the winter months in the northern hemisphere.