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RE: a neat trick to reduce energy cost for miners (and car drivers)
Interesting Idea! For me personally, mining by myself is too risky, I rather leave it to the professionals and invest in cloud mining: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@predprey/is-it-too-late-to-mine-bitcoins-now
Solo mining is indeed difficult. You might find it easier if you have the right kind of video card (GPU) in your system to instead gain a little extra income with 'pool' mining. NiceHash is a great place to start.
As to the Stirling engine, I am fairly sure that the units large enough to generate 1-5kW are expensive and large. Keeping in mind that a single 6 video card rig can along pull more than 1kW on it's own. Any decent sized Bitcoin mine using ASIC's is going to be measuring their power draw in the range of 200-1000kW (1MW). A couple of decent sized wind-farms might be a better method. There is also the really large Bitcoin mine in Iceland using geothermal power.
you may be right but the 1kw engines are small enough to fit in a standard sized household boiler. i haven't looked into larger models, not sure if anyone makes them. but someone should. any large industrial computer processing farm must produce an enormous amount of waste heat over its lifetime. there's so much heat energy being dumped that could be re-cycled i'm sure a producer of larger stirlings could find a market for them if they tried... we recycle everything else these days, why not energy?
if the iceland farm wanted to expand using this method they could do so without paying for more energy from the geothermal producer. the cold conditions there would make it way cheaper to cool the cold side of the stirling too so increase the efficiency of the system. if they're in his for the long haul, and are making enough money, i really think it could work for them... but who knows...
sorry to drag you back to the idea, being a noob here my post has not had many views so there's no-one else to discuss it with...
was just thinking about it again, and in reference to the 1MW that you say a large mining farm might draw, if you bear in mind that stirling engine efficiency seems to range from 10 to 30%, that might result in 100 to 300kW of power that the mine could re-use or sell back to the grid to reduce their costs... if they just pumped all the heat to a stirling instead of simply venting the hot air...
but anyway... I'll shut up about it now.. hopefully someday someone will see this and take the idea further..
i wouldn't know where to start with mining myself, not my skillset at all... prefer to get my btc playing poker and trading alts... all good fun... thanks for the upvote... would love to know if this could be made to work. seems like it should be possible...