Are you a person whose house is always too cold in the winter, but you also want to mine cryptocurrency? Boy, is today your lucky day. In what may be the most unlikely, yet somewhat logical, pairing of two completely different consumer products ever, we now live in a world that offers a home heater that is also a cryptocurrency mining computer. Like an old computer that has too many windows open, this cryptocurrency mining computer will keep you warm on the coldest of days.
French computing company Qarnot has debuted the QC1 cryptocurrency heater. The thought process here is that cryptocurrency mining computers use tremendous amounts of energy to constantly search for digital money bits on the internet. There have been studies that cryptocurrency mining uses as much energy as the entire country of Denmark. Qarnot says that “the heat of your QC-1 is generated by the 2 graphics cards embedded in the device and mining crypto-currencies or blockchain transactions: while heating, you create money.” The QC-1 has AMD GPUs, Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX580 with 8GB of VRAM.
The QC-1 links up to an app that you download on your phone. There you can see how the cryptocurrency markets are doing in real time and how much money you are making or losing. The cryptoheater can mine digital currencies such as ethereum, bitcoin, and litecoin. The unit can be used by people who have little knowledge of cryptocurrencies.
Qarnot’s QC-1 costs about $3,500 and the company claims that you will mine approximately $120 per month of cryptocurrency. However, that figure doesn’t include the power usage. Whether you use that much energy heating your house is for you to decide. My question is this sounds great in the winter, but what happens the other nine months of the year? Will you end up paying higher electric bills because you’re attempting to cool your home that has a heater blasting your home 24 hours a day?