Bitcoin Forum

Electricity cost per hash (at the current difficulty) would be an interesting metric to estimate - obviously this varies depending on the efficiency of the mining farm, but is there a rough way to get an estimate, or a range bound?

Do you mean you're interested in finding the electricity cost/use per block found? Because electricity cost per hash doesn't change with difficulty, that only changes with the gear used to mine on. An Antminer S5 will always hash at 1155GH/s while using ~ 590W, so it's "hash efficiency" will always be 1.96GH/s per watt. However as the difficulty increases, it'll cost more on average to find a block with an S5, because it'll take longer to do so.

I worded that badly - yes I'm after the cost per hash, which will then let you calculate the cost per block.

Power cost also needs to include inefficiencies in the power distribution network, e.g. losses from the electric meter to the panel to the power supplies to the miners.  In addition, power cost also needs to include power required for cooling, such as running any fans or air conditioners (beyond those already in the miners if the miner consumption includes fan consumption).

There can be favorable costs, as well.  For example, electricity used by mining equipment can also provide heating to offset required heating of a residence in cold countries during the heating season.  If all heat produced by miners goes to heat the building to a desirable temperature without having to waste heat by external venting, then electricity for mining is effectively free, subject to the rates of alternative fuels (e.g. oil, natural gas, propane).

Here is a very useful website for this:

www.coinwarz.com

It seems it takes data in real time in terms of difficulty and you can calculate your gains depending on electricity bill, hashing power of your gear etc. Im not completely sure if this is what you are asking for but just in case i drop that link.

I think are making something fairly simple into something confusing.

Your machine has X hash your machine cost Y. You do X divided by Y. You now have the exact value of your "interesting metric to estimate".

Then you need to select a timeframe, like 1 day and see the average PH for current difficulty vs how many blocks.

You do a simple PHs/blocks over one day averaged and you have your "metric" down to something fairly accurate.

Then you divide your second metric with your $/gh value and bam. You now know how much $ you need in term of GHS to get 1 block per day average.

Now we assumed free electricity but of course you would compare J/GH of the hardware you would buy to see which is more favorable over time.

also, you could find a calculator on a website that would do this.