Reality has completely outdone the human capacity for satire:

French startup Qarnot unveiled a new computing heater specifically made for cryptocurrency mining. You’ve read that right, the QC1 is a heater for your home that features a passive computer inside. And this computer is optimized for mining.

While most people use laptops, back in the golden days of computer towers, you could heat a room with a couple of desktop computers. And heat is still one of the biggest challenges when you’re building a data center. You have to cool thousands of computers that run 24/7.

Qarnot started thinking about edge computing for data centers back in 2010. The company has built three generations of computing heaters with multiple CPUs and sold them to construction companies looking for heaters for their new buildings.

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And now, the company is selling its first devices to end users directly. The company thinks it’s the perfect use case for cryptocurrency mining. The QC1 features two AMD GPUs (Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX580 with 8GB of VRAM) and is designed to mine Ethers by default.

You can set it up in a few minutes by plugging an Ethernet cable and putting your Ethereum wallet address in the mobile app. You’ll then gradually receive ethers on this address — Qarnot doesn’t receive any coin, you keep 100 percent of your cryptocurrencies.

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But that’s where the Qarnot QC1 stands out and could be the crypto miner we’ve all been waiting for. Mining has become increasingly harder if you have to pay the electricity bill. But you still need to heat your home during those cold days of winter. So why not mine at the same time. 

Seriously?  This is the most insane consumer heating technology since Ford Motor Company marketed the Pinto as a 4 passenger portable stove.