Bitcoin Miners Are Heating Homes Free of Charge in Frigid Siberia
by: Anna Baydokova

Hotmine CEO Oles Slobodenyuk couldnt have picked a better place to pitch his product: a bitcoin mining rig that doubles as a home heating appliance.

Irkutsk, Eastern Siberia, is famously cold in the winter, when subzero temperatures are the norm. So a few weeks ago, when Slobodenyuk took the stage at the Baikal Blockchain and Crypto Forum with one of Hotmines little white boxes in tow, he opened with a joke about the warm August weather.

I was told that in Irkutsk, the average temperature of the air is minus 2 degrees Celsius, so I brought a radiator with me, he said.

Eventually, Slobodenyuk told the crowd, Hotmine aspires to sell up to 200,000 of its devices to Irkutsk residents. But the Ukraine-based companys ultimate ambitions are even greater.

Our goal is to reach the point where 80 percent of all mining is done with the smart use of the hot air its producing, at the same time protecting the bitcoin network, Slobodenyuk told CoinDesk, adding:

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We believe mining should become decentralized again, with a full node in every home.

Its a lofty goal, given that the four largest mining pools control about 60 percent of the total hashrate, or processing power devoted to securing the bitcoin network, according to BTC.com. But like bitcoin itself, Hotmine will seek to employ economic incentives to achieve its decentralist ideals.

According to Slobodenyuk, each Hotmine miner performs calculations at a rate of 8 tera hashes per second (th/s). With the current price of bitcoin, he said, 1 th/s earns about $7.20 a month, so a single heater can make about $55 for its owner while radiating heat for up to 10 square meters.

While the concept itself isnt new last year, a French company called Qarnot announced a CPU-based mining heater that earns ether, for example Hotmine is focusing on a region where its likelier to resonate.

At the current prices for electricity in Irkutsk of 1-2 cents per kilowatt-hour, one heater needs less than $10 worth of power per month, so effectively the heat would be free, plus a modest income in bitcoin, Slobodenyuk said.

Even the coming halving, or periodic reduction in the amount of new bitcoin awarded to miners, wont hurt this model, he claimed.
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