QC1: The cryptocurrency-mining home heater

Thanks to a new device from French startup Qarnot, you can now mine cryptocurrencies whilst keeping your house warm. Called the QC1, it is a noiseless and stylish heater that doubles as a mining rig, which Qarnot claims to be ‘the first heater actually generating crypto money’. In other words, as the market heats up, so will your home and wallet.

’The heat of your QC-1 is generated by the 2 graphics cards embedded in the device and mining crypto-currencies or blockchain transactions”,

the product description reads.

“You can watch in real time how crypto markets are trending, on your mobile app and on your QC-1 LEDs”.

Simply plug the heater in, add your crypto wallet to its mobile app, and as the heater warms up, you’ll start receiving the mined cryptocurrency, of which Qarnot does not take a cut, the firm said. Being set to mine Ether by default, the QC1 operates on a Linux server, so users can tell it to mine another currency instead, such as Litecoin or Monero.

About Qarnot

The notion of computer-heaters is not completely foreign to the startup. Qarnot’s innovations focusing on edge computing for data centers actually date back to 2010, when it began selling computer-heaters to construction companies. The company had constructed three generations of computing heaters with multiple CPUs, selling them to firms requiring heaters in their new buildings. As sales grew, this created an expanding data centre, which Qarnot rented out to the French financial sector among other clients.

Hence, as Qarnot still runs these businesses, it may be able to farm out crypto processing to its decentralized data centres during summer, such that QC1 owners don’t melt in their homes.

See this short video by Mashable, which explains the QC1 crypto heater:

