Wendell Cathcart,  Nicholas School MEM’19

Laptops, phones, game consoles – all personal electronics that contain computer chips generate heat when used. This fact may seem obvious. But did you know that each watt of electricity your device consumes to “compute” something is released as a watt of heat? Computers work by essentially manipulating electrons into solving math problems, converting electricity into heat in the process. In fact, you could think of computers as space heaters that also solve math problems.

The total amount of heat generated by computers becomes staggering when you consider our dependence on warehouses full of computers, called server farms, to provide all of the internet-based services we use. Most server farms move their waste heat outdoors, but what if this heat could instead be used to heat homes? Or perhaps the servers themselves could be distributed to homes where their heat could be used directly. Home owners could repurpose this waste heat for free or even be paid to heat their homes.

Mining cryptocurrencies is a lot like getting paid to run a home server. Mining converts electricity to heat while providing computational services to a blockchain and small payments of cryptocurrency to the miner. In the winter, this effectively means you get paid to heat your home with your desktop computer. Programs such as nicehash will turn any computer into an electric space heater whose earnings will at least defray the cost of electricity.  So, if you have a spare desktop computer sitting around and your room is a little chilly, don’t turn on your regular old space heater, fire up your miner!