don't get me wrong.. I think he's basically right also... except the 100% power is converted to heat part
Now if he said that 100% power is converted to one form of energy or another, such as heat, light, kinetic and whatever else i'm forgeting right now. then i can find no fault in that statement.
If you want to claim that it's not 100% efficient, you have to provide a viable path for energy to exit the system of your home. I will give you that it is likely not actually 100% efficient, but it's probably five 9s or so. Keep in mind your computer might generate noise, which is a pressure wave and not directly heat, but the vast majority of that would still be absorbed within the confines of your house. The heat of the tower could emit blackbody radiation, but hopefully the outside of your tower isn't more than a few degrees above ambient. You could argue that the bitcoin traffic causes a loss of energy from your house system when your cable/dsl modem is transmitting, but I would guess even if that case the effect is vanishingly small. You could say the same about light; if you have a crapload of LEDs on the outside of your case, and there's a window nearby and some light escapes, you might lose a few microwatts at best, but that's about it.
Really, the wear and tear argument is totally valid, especially if you're running at full fan speed and elevated temperature. The noise being annoying is also very valid. That claim that bitcoin mining is wasteful of energy when the home is already being heated by electricity is completely wrong though, from an HVAC perspective it's just as efficient as a baseboard heater and you have the bonus of doing useful work at the same time.
nope... that's completely wrong.. unless it's on fire.. then you'll also get that caustic smoke too.
heat from a computer is wasted energy... if you're converting 100% of that power from the computer to heat.. i'd be calling 911 NOW...cause it's on fire.
That makes no sense. If your rig was on fire, you would be converting chemical energy into heat, not electrical.
You're an EE, so this should be a fairly easy example. Do a mental energy balance on a hypothetical system. It consumes 500W. At the start, it is not expelling 500W of heat as it's cold. Some of the energy is used to raise the components above ambient and is stored in the system. As the system warms up, it eventually reaches equilibrium with the environment and temperatures stabilize. You're still pumping 500W into it, so where is that energy going?
1) Heat
2) Sound
3) Light
Nothing to do with lighting anything on fire.
2 is vanishingly small. If your system is producing 60dB@1m, the total power of the pressure wave is 12.6uW. Almost all of that would be absorbed be the air or walls before it ever exited the house.
3 is also tiny. The system will emit blackbody IR, but even if there are a lot of windows in the room any kind of coated window is designed to keep that in the house. The actual amount of energy that will be lost to light will be tiny, and wouldn't actually be much different than a baseboard heater anyway.