No, all space heaters are equally efficient. They all have perfect 100% efficiency, because they turn electrical power into heat. When your work product is heat and the waste product is also heat, then there really is no waste.
Technically in the case of cryptocurrency mining, some of the electrical power is turned into information rather than heat. In principle this reduces the amount of heat that you get, but in practice this isn’t even measurable. Most of the information is erased (discarded as useless), which turns it back into heat. Only a few hundred bits of information will be kept after successfully mining a block of transactions, and the amount of heat that costs you is fantastically small. Far smaller than you can measure.
More transistors per unit area, but also more efficient please! There should be demand for more efficient chips (semiconductors,) that are fully-utilized while depreciating on your ma's electricity bill (which is not yet (?) really determined by a market-based economy with intraday speculation to smooth over differences in supply and demand in the US). Oversupply of the electrical grid results in damage costs; which is why the price sometimes falls so low where there are intraday prices and supply has been over-subsidized pending the additional load from developing economies and EVs: Electric Vehicles.
New grid renewables (#CleanEnergy) are now less expensive than existing baseload; which makes renewables long term environment-rational and short term price-rational.
> No, all space heaters are equally efficient. They all have perfect 100% efficiency, because they turn electrical power into heat. When your work product is heat and the waste product is also heat, then there really is no waste.
This heat must be distributed throughout the room somehow (i.e. a batteryless woodstove fan or a sterling engine that does work with the difference in entropy when there is a difference in entropy)
> Technically in the case of cryptocurrency mining, some of the electrical power is turned into information rather than heat. In principle this reduces the amount of heat that you get, but in practice this isn’t even measurable. Most of the information is erased (discarded as useless), which turns it back into heat.
See "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" re: a possible way to delete known observer-entangled bits while reducing heat/entropy (thus bypassing Landauer's limit for classical computation?)?
> Only a few hundred bits of information will be kept after successfully mining a block of transactions, and the amount of heat that costs you is fantastically small. Far smaller than you can measure.
Each n-symbol sequence in the hash function output does appear to have nearly equal frequency/probability of occurrence. Indeed, is Proof-of-Work worth the heat if you're not reusing the waste heat?
