If you read this post a month ago, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was an April Fools post. But we assure you, this is no joke. A company called HeatBit recently opened pre-orders for its second-generation Bitcoin miner that doubles as a space heater.
The logic goes something like this: If you’re going to use an electric space heater anyway, which essentially generates heat by wasting a bunch of energy with a resistive element, why not replace that element with a Bitcoin miner instead? Or at least some of the element. The specifications listed for the HeatBit Mini note that the miner itself only uses 300 watts, which is only responsible for a fraction of the device’s total heat output. Most of the thermal work is actually done by a traditional 1000 watt heater built inside the 46 cm (18 in) tall cylindrical unit.
This new Mini version looks very different from the original HeatBit, a towering machine that combined outdated ASIC miners with a turbine-style fan to produce heat. Doing some research on the older model, it seems the results were very mixed, with several reviewers complaining that the last-generation application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) used by the $1,200 heater would take far too long to mine enough crypto to pay for themselves.
By comparison, the $299 Mini seems more like a traditional heater with a secondary Bitcoin mining mode. We’d say that at that price, the concept is probably worth trying, if it weren’t for the fine print… if you buy the Mini at this “early bird” price, HeatBit will skim off 50% of your Bitcoin the device cranks out. If you want to keep all the coins for yourself, you’ll have to pay for the “Full Ownership” version which has an introductory price of $549 and climbs to $749 when the heaters are available at retail.
If that’s not bad enough, the specs for the Mini show a hashrate of up to 10 TH/s. We ran it through a few calculators, and combined with the stated power consumption of 300 watts, it looks like the device isn’t even able to break even at current BTC prices. So if you were hoping to make money, forget it.
Assuming the current price of about $26,800 USD to 1 BTC, the Mini would bring in about $22 a month if you ran it for 24 hours a day. But at the average cost of electricity in the US ($0.16/kWh), it would have cost you about $35 just to run it. Factor in the 50% that HeatBit takes off the top and the math just doesn’t work. Sure you can say it’s cheaper to run than a traditional electric heater, but the payoff for the hardware is just too far when you consider you’ll only be using the thing a few months of the year to begin with.
Bottom line, if you want to try heating your office with Bitcoin, you’re better off picking up a second-hand ASIC miner and building the thing yourself. It still wouldn’t be the money-making scheme it might seem at first glance, but at least you wouldn’t have some company taking half of your profits every month.
