I've seen plenty of people talking about the energy consumption of LLMs/'AI', especially on Mastodon. Many of them think that the 'crypto bros' moved into that field, but I'm not sure there's that much of an overlap.

Using industrial heat for domestic application is nothing new. In East Germany a lot of people had their homes heated by the waste heat from the coal power stations. That was an issue when they got shut down after re-unification. Elsewhere it's been used to heat greenhouses. Crypto is just another source of heat and not that special really. Some people will just wonder if it's a useful thing to be doing.

I also saw domestic room heaters a while back that had heavy duty processing units inside. Those may have been for things like data centres rather than crypto. Of course you then have too much excess heat in summer, but it could still be used for heating water.

In general we need joined-up thinking to reduce waste of all kinds. It may need incentives just as taxing those who just dump the heat into the air or rivers.