Hear me out:
ASIC set up that can produce enough heat to generate steam.
Steam flows to a turbine, turbine powers generator, generator powers ASICs.
I know this isn’t possible with current tech but imagine a fully self sustaining mining rig. 0 cost mining.
You’re breaking laws of thermodynamics
Laws are meant to be broken!
In all seriousness though, how so? I figured it was impossible but I don’t understand thermodynamics enough to get it.
There's no such thing as a 100% energy transfer. Heating water will lose some heat to the environment. Steam will dissipate before converting to useful mechanical energy. Friction in your generator will sap energy from the system. The generator will lose some electric energy to heat which dissipates in the environment. And on and on and on.
But those are concrete reasons. Generally the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy in a closed system always trends towards a maximum. i.e. there's no free lunch.
Perpetual energy from a closed system is not possible. Energy can neither be created not be destroyed
Right, and i know this isn’t possible. But lets say ASICs could get hot enough to generate steam, use a different power source initially until the ASICs get hot enough to start the steam process, then the power source switches to the generator. So you bring in the initial energy from a different source.
I’m aware I sound like an idiot, I have no idea how this all works.
You will still need outside source time to time but you can make it efficient. The ROI will be realized after many many years to build such a system
Makes sense, thanks for explaining. I think it’d be a cool experiment to see just how efficient it could get if the proper tech was available.
There is no free lunch, the recycled energy would be a fraction of the energy it consumed
Pesky thermodynamics...
Yeah…learning more about those with each reply lol
One way to think about it is, you can't have an engine with no losses. 100 percent of the electricity doesn't make it to heat, less of that makes it to the steam pressure, and then you incur losses in turbine wear. So you can't make a perpetual motion machine, but it's a good idea and maybe there is something there with recycling otherwise wasted energy
Ahhh, i see, that makes sense.
Apparently high-temp chips (up to 300°C) are a thing, so it’s not entirely outlandish. You’d still have to have some sort of external power source to account for losses in the system though.
But the idea of zero cost mining is why I’m keeping my eye on the battery tech that’s currently being developed. Mining with solar during the day + battery banks at night = the farm of my dreams.
Did not know those chips existed. I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of this idea last night because I have little to no knowledge on thermodynamics, but I learned a lot about “thermal batteries” which I didn’t even know existed. I also discovered small wind turbines that can be installed anywhere but they don’t seem to generate much power. Just another rabbit hole to go down I suppose.
