Say, a clothes iron, or washing machine/dishwasher water heater (where not already plumbed for hot water), etc.

Since computation ultimately dumps essentially 100% of the consumed energy as heat, why not use it for that?

Obvious arguments against are the cost of the initial hardware, and the engineering difficulty of making something which can actually operate whilst generating kilowatts of heat (i.e. not cooking your cores in the process)

The crux seems to be Moore's Law. We buy heaters and use them for decades, but any compute device has a useful lifetime of a few years before it's surpassed. If we ever see Moore's Law come to an end, expect to see a lot of highly-distributed computing.

Using compute for heat is a dodgy proposition even where heat is needed at least half the year. The minimal uptime of an iron or kettle really puts the kibosh on the economics.

I suspect that's been the case for a few years - at each time I investigated, in the pre-ASIC days starting from 2011, the electricity cost was roughly the same as the Bitcoin value, and the only people who seemed to be able to mine profitably were ones with "free" electricity (e.g. students in halls of residence).

(Likewise with gold you know there's a pile of acidic tailings and a river full of arsenic to back it up, and with diamond mining quite a lot of real human suffering)

A bitcoin is basically a token that says that someone, somewhere has spent a (quite large) amount of electricity on your behalf to make sure that your bitcoins are secure and safe.

(The more computing power used, the harder it is to counterfeit transactions.)

you could. check out proof of idle.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/29/2128137/calling-all-mu...

That is not true. Most mining is done professionally in data centers these days, by companies that all pay for their own electricity without screwing anyone:

This is KnC's facility: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/07/10/massi...

This is MegaBigPower: http://www.kplu.org/post/central-wash-home-nations-biggest-b...

21 Inc has a 26 megawatt facility: http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/

And so on. They certainly seem to be making a profit; it is much easier to do so nowadays (~5% monthly increases of the difficulty level) compared to last year (30-40% monthly increases).

Meanwhile "Pay" items will still be widely available from numerous online vendors. These devices will require you to enter your personal Bitcoin address, so they can credit you with their mining.

And thus the world will continue to be dominated by Whales, so named for the size of their bank accounts. The rich will be able to keep the entirety of their revenue, while the poor must subsist not only on the charity of the State, but also the charity of the Corporation.

It certainly raises some interesting problems with ownership... if I can modify my hardware/software to disable unwanted features, this certainly fits in that category.

A USB charger that phoned home? If it's free, I'd certainly take it and modify it so it doesn't, in a similar fashion to the way a Lenovo laptop with Superfish would get its OS wiped and reinstalled.

If you get a free sports bag from your local training center, is it ethically right for you to use a black marker and erase their printed logo?

I think most people would say that once the training center has given you the sports bag, even if their intention was for you to advertise their brand by walking around with it, it's no longer their property and they cannot control it.

I've collected a few "ad supported" free items (keychains, bags, writing boards, etc.) from various trade shows and conventions, and of those that are still usable, amusingly enough the logo was the first thing to come off from normal wear and tear.

uTorrent just did this by running a background miner bundled with the software. Considering how much extra coal we're going to burn for this, I think its going to become a regulation issue sooner than later. The industry's greed is begging for it.

I'd also be worried about a fire risk from these things. How hot do they get? How much ventilation do they need? How well do they handle a hot day in the American South without A/C? What kind of QA can we expect here considering these will be disposable tchotski's.

Have there been precedents of profiteering by hiding _something_ invisible to the end-user but with an ulterior purpose into normal consumer electronics?

How do Global Fortune 500 companies think bundling malware is OK still after all the bad press the last few years?

Half of Silicon Valley is either built on spying on people or selling to those who are spying on people. It's the original sin of social networking.

You could try and stay under that 0.3W load, or only start using real power whle under load, but I expect the EU will move to forbid that, too, if an Intel-scale company starts doing it.

That will probably kill this idea world-wide, as economies of scale make it cheaper to have only one type of charger (economies of scale similarly exported lead-free soldering from the EU to the world and car safety and economics guidelines from California to the USA to the world)

http://iang.org/papers/BitcoinBreachesGreshamsLaw.pdf

Then it was in the context of botnets and chinese miners -- but the theory is that dishonest mining (stolen electricity) will necessarily drive our honest mining which will spell doom for Bitcoin.

Wasn't there also a company that pre-sold mining rigs, used the pre-sale money to fund the manufacturing, and then used the equipment to mine for a few months before shipping, at which point the equipment could no longer profitably mine?