alt Hacker NewsAnother option:
Deliberate heat generation.
If it's cold and you're going to be running a heater anyways, then if your heat is resistive, then running a cryptominer is just as efficient and returns a couple dollars back to you. It effectively becomes "free" relative to running the heater.
If you use a heat pump, or you rely on burning something (natural gas, wood, whatever) to generate heat, then the math changes.
Yeah the calculus on that becomes tricky when you have heat pumps since the coefficient of performance is >1 vs resistive heating (often 3-4 depending on the temperature).
I used a rack of GPUs to heat my house for a few years back when gpu mining was decently profitable, and my electricity bill was 3-4x more than with the heat pump - so you have to keep a close eye on the math when you're running at/under profitability.