> every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat.

Yes it ends up as heat, but with some forethought, it could be used to eg heat people's homes rather than as waste.

agumonkey 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

These days it's not rare to have data center heated buildings. I guess crypto bros are just not thinking about this. But technically if could be done there too.

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KellyCriterion 2 days ago | parent [-]

There was a startup in EU which explicitly sold heat from crypto mining to the local energy provider. IIRC it was also here on hacker news some time ago.

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agumonkey 2 days ago | parent [-]

Qarnot maybe

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KellyCriterion a day ago | parent [-]

I meant this team:

https://terahash.space/en/

	▲	agumonkey a day ago \| parent [-]
		oh nice, i didn't know about them

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TheSpiceIsLife 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You can say that about any waste heat.

In really, it’s not convenient to move all waste heat to where it’s more needed.

	▲	m4rtink 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Modern industrial scale insulated hot water district heating systems can do dozens of kilometers with the water cooling down only by a degree Celsius.
	▲	tremon 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's always more convenient to ignore externalities. That doesn't mean we should be okay with only bottom-of-the-barrel solutions.