Once a year or so I check on the prices of used miners to see if it would be reasonable to use one as a space heater. Payback period has never been low enough for me to be comfortable with it. (If you buy $300 of equipment and mining becomes illegal tomorrow, then those miners are worthless.)
You’re not wrong. Mining operators tamper their energy meters so their usage don’t reflect in the bill. My neighbour turned his residence into a mining farm, judging by the ludicrous number of installed air conditioning lol.
Hard to imagine people will still be buying and selling crypto anywhere near the scale it is today if it’s illegal in the US. A lot of the value is “future value” like a stock.
For a used Antminer S9 you need average total electricity price to be below $0.08/kWh to have break-even in 1 year, it seems. In year 2 you will have earned about $600.
If you look at GPU mining, a single RTX 3090 setup (assuming you already have a computer to put it in) requires electricity cost below $0.05/kWh to have break-even in 1 year.
The sunk cost here is my existing forced-air electric heat, which is already installed in my house and already turns 1 watt of electricity into 1 watt of heat, or the other space heater I bought ten years ago and can easily put anywhere I need spot heating. If the goal is turn electricity into heat and nothing else, then I am already well supplied with ways to do that.
Since there's very little mechanical work on a miner, it also turns one watt of electricity into one watt of heat. What it'll also do is generate a small amount of bitcoin to help you pay for the electricity.
It's sunk cost if you already have a miner and need a room heater.
Assuming you had already bought the mining rig, it would continue to function as a heater regardless of legislative changes, and act as a redundant system to your existing heaters to boot.
