Your TV A Bitcoin Miner?
Yes, China-based Bitcoin mining products maker, Canaan Creative has revealed it’s plans to marry hardware and everyday products into one Bitcoin mining relationship.
South China Morning Post reported that Canaan has launched something called “AvalonMiner Inside. A TV set which can process 2.8 trillion hashes per second. Wow. That’s hot. Literally it’s going to be really HOT.
Bitcoin mining is already utterly difficult, high energy consumption and creates a lot of heat. I’m just not sure how you would run a 1700W miner + an AC unit pulling between 6-12 amps on the same circuit. Even then how much power would be wasted on cooling the miner? These sure sound cool but would be very impractical. Also consider that if the hashing units break then you probably can’t use your AC unit and vice versa (unless of course the two can be used separately if needed).
Canaan’s not the first company to try meshing mining and consumer products. Bitcoin start up 21 Inc and Chinese appliance manufacturer Midea Group have tried in the past to create appliances like AC units with chips inside that could mine. They even made a patent for the idea.
But not everyone is excited about Canaan’s and these other companies bold ideas. Xiao Lei, a Beijing-based Bitcoin Analyst, said “It looks more like hype. It will be more meaningful if these companies are able to embed the mining function into existing major TV brands.”
Canaan has also debuted the Avalon Miner A9, which provides a hashrate of up to 30 TH/s, with a power consumption of 1,720 watts per unit, according to Canaan’s website. The price of the new miner has not yet been disclosed on the website.
How much power do you think this will need to cool down? Bitcoin mining is essentially extremely difficult now, with almost over 80% of the hashing power coming straight from Chinese mining farms. So these products will not help the average person trying to mine. In fact, unless you had been mining it early on, these products are more so hype then anything else and giants like Canaan are trying to jump on the ‘bitcoin bandwagon’ to make some money and then swiftly leave.
Canaan took in 1.3 billion yuan (about US$205 million) in revenue in 2017, a 27-fold increase from the year earlier. Its profit in 2017 was 361 million yuan, up more than 230-fold from 2015, according to its filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
In 2017, Avalon miners accounted for 19.5 per cent of the world’s processing power for mining bitcoin, the filing said, citing data from consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.
So they’re doing alright. But again, Bitcoin mining is extremely difficult and this TV thing is going to need incredible amount of cooling down. It would be interesting to see how this is done, since TV’s are already hot enough.
What do you think? Would you purchase this?
Cheers,
A.Yasir