Over the past few months, I've had the unique experience of testing out a Bitcoin-mining space heater—literally a cryptomining rig with some radiant heating coils stacked on top of it for added warmth.
The idea, as the founder of Heatbit explained it to me, is that cryptomining uses a ton of energy, which produces a bunch of excess of heat. As long as people are going to be mining crypto anyway, why not repurpose that heat into something useful?
It's a valid point, one that I tried to consider earnestly in my full-length Heatbit product review over at Wirecutter. I was surprised to find that it does actually function as a fairly decent space heater. But perhaps less surprising was the fact that there's still no way to justify the $900 price tag. As I wrote:
Even if I were to let the Heatbit Trio run 24 hours a day for an entire month, adding about $67 to my electrical bill, I would earn only around 0.0001246 BTC, or a whopping $12.50, assuming I were to cash out right now.
[…]
Heatbit has even acknowledged that its heater is not designed to pay for itself. Our long-running Vornadopick is smaller, quieter, and capable of warming the room faster, and it comes with a five-year warranty that's not incumbent upon a continued subscription. On top of that, in going for the Vornado model, you'll keep an extra $800 or so in your pocket to do with as you please.
[…]
In fact, if you were to take all the money you saved by buying the Vornado VH200 instead of the Heatbit Trio, you could potentially buy around 0.008 BTC at the current exchange rate—the equivalent of about 64 months' worth of mining income, assuming the Heatbit Trio could last that long.
I did speak with some earnest cryptominers for the article—and even they pointed out that at-home Bitcoin mining in particular is not a way to make money (though they argued that one can still make money at home by mining other forms of crypto).
I was genuinely hoping the Heatbit could offer some sort of solution to the inherent absurdity of burning tons of energy and carbon just to produce intangible assets with no practical value. But alas.
This Space Heater Mines Bitcoin While Keeping You Warm. (But Not Enough to Pay for Itself.) [Thom Dunn / New York Times' Wirecutter]
