Gas heater broke down? I'll just heat my caravan with a Bitcoin miner
Michael Schmid first made contact with Bitcoin (BTC) in 2013; he installed Bitcoin core, mined a few BTC then bought some Bitcoin from MtGox. Schmid told Cointelegraph that shortly after the infamous Mt. Gox hack, in which Schmid lost his Bitcoin, he also “lost interest”.
Timewarp to 2020 and Schmid got “very active again,” as concerns about the “endless money printing” troubled him.
A studious and curious mind, Schmid bored back down the BTC mining rabbit hole, building upon the foundations of knowledge he had excavated 7 years prior. He learned about “ASICs, Antminers and all the other things that happened in the last years in the Bitcoin mining space,” before having a eureka moment.
As Schmid was working in an office at the time, he “bought an S9 from a friend and used the S9 miner instead of the space heater to heat my office which worked perfectly.” Schmid has discovered a winning combination.
He could solve valid Bitcoin blocks and reap the rewards while keeping his working and living space nice and warm. Office work aside, Schmid also enjoys traveling across America–often in his American-style campervan, an Airstream.
So when during Schmid’s next trip with his Airstream (see photos), the heating unit suffered intermittent problems, Schmid thought he “could use the S9 heater also to heat the Airstream as a fallback solution.”
They say necessity is the mother of invention so Schmid “started to think about how I [he] could build the system.” Space is at a premium in an Airstream and if the S9 were to be placed inside the camper “it would easily overheat the airstream.”
After a series of iterations and a few superficial burns, a short circuit and one day in which the airstream’s ambient temperature rivaled a Scandinavian
Read more on cointelegraph.com
