UPDATED 13:42 EDT / NOVEMBER 22 2011

NEWS

Dried Strawberries Bitcoin Style, Uses Heat from a Mining Rig

An enterprising grocer, and Bitcoin miner, from Canada has decided to put the waste-heat from his or her mining rig to good use and produced a product with it: dried strawberries. BetaBeat caught the news from a post on Reddit where a Redditor posted an image of some of the wrapped, dried strawberries now on sale at the local store for 1.5 BTC a bag (currently about $3.50).

The Redditor, posting under the handle of freeborn (who is a friend of the anonymous strawberry vendor), wrote that the store with the strawberries is in a town in Western Canada which has gone gaga over the cryptocurrency, “Western Canada, if your in the hood I can give you some more details. Waiting for some decent clients, before we start shouting ‘use your bitcoins over here’. You likely will be able to use bitcoins most places in town by late spring (local pub, grocery, computer shop, bed and breakfast [sic] already on board).”

The strawberries are sold at a local grocery store and the back of the label reads: “These berries were produced using filtered, recycled heat produced by computers that perpetuate Bitcoin: the world’s first alternative, decentralized currency.”

Bitcoin mining rigs generate a great deal of waste heat as they go through their computations. In fact, modern processors are designed to run better the faster that heat is wicked away from them; thus a particularly efficient heat sink on an overclocked processor can generate a great deal of waste heat. There’s even been a few strange proposals for the cloud involving giving homes bit-furnaces (i.e. cloud-computing nodes that run cloud-processes and use the generate waste heat to warm the home.) Using waste heat from a mining rig may be a gimmick; but it’s a fair use to recycle what is otherwise a byproduct of making bitcoins.

According to the freeborn, the berries are not available for shipping (yet), but the farmer/miner who produces them is thinking of looking into a e-commerce website. Bitcoin rig dried golden berries and goji berries are also available for bitcoin.


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