I'm neither a professional in cryptocurrency nor physics, but an interesting idea occurred to me. Bitcoin involves mining, which generates a lot of heat as waste.
Is the amount of heat produced by a computer mining bitcoin the same as a traditional heater, if they have the same input power?
I know of course about the law of conservation of energy, but it feels that some "work" has been done on the information in the system, and thus the waste heat energy produced would be less.
I know this mining is not work in the sense $W=Fd$, but it does seem to be decreasing the entropy in the universe by organising information. It feels intuitive that some energy should be used up in the very computation itself. If not, then wouldn't computation be free and hence it could be used to decrease entropy (by organizing information) without using energy?
Best Answer
Organising information requires energy but most of that energy ends up as heat because current computing technology depends on irreversible processes. If you try to use only reversible processes you will find that random changes in the environment quickly undo your organisation - like trying to sweep up the leaves on your lawn in a high wind - unless you take great care to isolate your computer from the outside world.
We can tell very precisely where the electrical energy that flows from your wall socket to your bitcoin miner ends up. Some of it is used to push electrons around circuits on PCBs. This energy ends up as heat, due to resistance in the circuits. Some of it is used to flash LEDs on or off - some of this energy ends up in light waves, but most of it ends up as heat. Some of is used to run fans to move the heat produced by all those busy electrons away from the PCBs. This energy also mostly ends up as heat - due to friction - although a small amount ends up as sound waves. Some of it ends up as energy in electromagnetic waves as the miner talks to your WiFi router.
But if we leave aside the small amount of energy sent out in EM waves and sound waves, all the rest of the energy used by your miner ends up as heat. And this is the same regardless of whether the PCBs are mining bitcoins or just flipping bits billions of times a second.
So your bitcoin miner is basically a room heater that might generate a very small amount of income as a side effect to offset its running costs. Indeed, there are companies that market cryptocurrency miners as (very expensive) room heaters.