Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin has created a vast mining sector within the network’s economy that is growing exponentially. Mining bitcoin has spread the technology towards new thoughts concerning energy consumption, ways to utilize bitcoin mining’s heat source, greener energy solutions and more.

As it stands today, the Bitcoin mining sector is robust with computations faster than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined. The global bitcoin mining economy consumes nearly $500 million in electrical and operational costs. Moreover, it’s estimated the bitcoin network could use as much electricity as Denmark by the year 2020. It’s safe to say securing the bitcoin network through mining is costly and consumes a lot of energy, but may offer a myriad of other benefits to the equation.

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-mining-power-growing-bigger-but-greener/

that calculation is at 2015/2016 calculations. (motherboard.vice article wrote march 2016 using data from before that date)

here is an update using hashrate of this week

today's hashrate converts to at most 200,000 S9 ASICS (<2.6m Thash)

at 1.3kwh per asic =260000kwh (260mw)

asia's 5cent electric = $13,000 an hour
USA's 10cent electric = $26,000 an hour
UK's 20cent electric= $52,000 an hour

asia's 5cent electric = $312,000 a day
USA's 10cent electric = $624,000 a day
UK's 20cent electric= $1,248,000 a day

asia's 5cent electric = $113,880,000 a year
USA's 10cent electric = $227,760,000 a year
UK's 20cent electric= $455,520,000 a year

enjoy

by the way UK miners are rare.. so world combined electric cost per year is between $113m-$227m
much less than last years estimate

I thought mining was only profitable to those whohas a huge investment amount. let me get confirmed that am i living in a conspracy/rummer or its all working in the other side. does mining really that much profitable which you guys are saying.and anyway the highest a cpu miner with almost normal configuration like(2gb ram, 3.something ghrz processor and sop on) can make about 0.001$ her hour which is ofcourse dumb idea to continue

It has to, right?

The cost and effort to mine coins gets greater with every halving.

The only way for mining to actually pay off is to increase scale of the operation and reduce the expense. I'm not surprised at all that effort is being placed to significantly increase efficiency of mining operations. For the local neighborhood guy there's just no profit to be made - unless you bank coins now and the price increases 10x or greater over time.

There are Chinese mines relying on hydro power, as we've seen on this forum, and having really cheap rates. The EU has funds for countries to take advantage of their wind power and install wind turbines. The USA is aimed at becoming the number one battery producer with Tesla (and SolarCity providing solar panels)... Mining can only get greener overtime: there will be more and more ways to use green energy and it will be cheaper to do so, thus more profitable... So no wonder miners are going green.

electric is not the issue. its the cost of buying the asic.

EG ~$450 electric(USA)...  asic $2100

its the asic that puts a real dent into ROI for miners.
you have to be an asic manufacturer making a rig for $400 just to break even.. we all know antpool is doing it and loving it.

Although the mining difficulty left already the level of a regular BTC user, the network itself has a great size and producing an amazing expansion. As it was suggested many times before, putting this network into additional use would enable many opportunities. I think, some projects are experimenting with it like Golem.

Funny, it's not as much as I would have thought.

0.2 billions... That's really not much when you think about it!
Well, it's 10 times what facebook costs of electricity.
Don't think it's really an "ecological" problem.

The Chinese miners do have the larger equipment, larger mining power, larger power consumption and yet has the greener and lesser cost per kW/h. It shouldn't be a matter of $ in the long run since you know, we burn too much fossil fuels to have electricity and we are here, trying make money out of burning something most of the time but hey, $ is more important than this world itself. But anyways, mining is becoming more and more efficient as we progress and look for greener ways to mine bitcoin and that is really, really good if you might ask me.

Electricity is an issue. However I do agree that ASIC's might be a bigger issue where the majority of the hashrate is being produced. However this is a thread about electricity, so... :)

Green energy is still very expensive and the production of solar panels isn`t always ecological.
Combining bitcoin mining plus green energy can`t be profitable with the technologies we have nowadays.
Anyway after 21M bitcoins mining will stop and we don`t have to worry about electricity costs and polution.

if they are smart enough they could utilize the heat to produce additional electricty by using thermoelectrict generato or thermionic

instead of wasting money for adding new device that only increase the diff and nothing else

Green energy using solar energy to run mining farms is a great idea. It maybe costly in the beginning since you nee to purchase panels and other materials including installation but on the longer run it will be efficient. Solar powered bitcoin mining farms can save huge electric bills and will give way to more profit rather than using raw electricity which is more expensive.

many mine with much less effiecnt hardware. So it will probably be in 200-300M or so. OF course unless they have free electtricity.

Only economical solution for next 50 years of mining is nuclear reactor generated electricity, I know building reactors is hard and costs a lot but imagine you could produce power for decades with only a few kilograms of enriched uranium, but the problem is lack of technology and those accessing such technology either are sanctioned or can't afford to build sufficiently due to shortage of financial and political support.

I've read an article about this bitcoin mining problem because it do really consume a lot of energy and its hardware that is being used in every bitcoin miner's PC is really expensive, that is why, many bitcoin miners and companies that mines bitcoin has already stopped on doing this stuff. On the other way, behind this problem about the price of bitcoin mining, others already have a solution about this problem, which, they would still earn a lot more bigger than the capital that they are going to spend in the bitcoin mining.

People are making a big deal out of electricity "wasted" on Bitcoin mining, but are they saying the same about other areas? How much

electricity are wasted on manufacturing automobiles for instance. Bitcoin is defined as a commodity in some countries, so we should compare

apples with apples. If Bitcoin was defined as a currency, then you will have to compare it to the electricity spend to run the whole banking

system, and that would be MUCH more electricity wasted than with Bitcoin mining.  ;D .... A lot of miners are using the by product, "heat" to

offset their electricity to heat up their houses in cold areas.  ;D

you mean instead of aircon/fans to cool the asics..

eg
have a chimney that sucks the heat up and away from the asics and through a pipe that then goes to a generator or to heat water.
yep that can gain some efficiency, but not much.

---

as a side note people need to know. that power stations are already producing a minimum amount of electric. even if not being used they need to be running. so electric gets wasted.

at the moment the world is trying to convert Mongolia into a developed country. so having a power plant producing X, but while the area is not developed only 0.001% of X is being used, so 99.999% of X just gets wasted and unused.

letting asic farms use 0.y% of X on the cheap helps the asic farm and also helps the power plant from just wasting X, while the region grows and develops its residential, industrial and retail to then utilise X aswell.

Stop bitching about all this green nonsense. Bitcoin is far more useful than any other bullshit thing that people spend electricity on.

How much electricity do you waste when you leave the lights on/ globe / year? I bet a lot more.

Besides you pay for electricity , so why cant you use it for anything you want.


All these green communists just want to control you, and want to tell you what you can use the electricity that you already pay for, for.



If you don't like carbons or oil, then go to the big oil companies to complain, but leave BTC out of this, or start up a solar panel company, and sell solar panel units specialized for bitcoin mining.

But don't just come with "we must save the earth" nonsense. It's the utter arrogance that humans have.


Like George Carlyn said, the Earth doesnt need saving, humans do (from the idiocy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

easiest reply is

while people cry about bitcoins electric which is spread out across the world.

think about the amount of lightbulbs and neon signs on the streets
the lights and aircon in hotelrooms and casino's

being wasted to try making poker chips something of value in las vegas

oh and to put it into perspective 400,000mw/year for one city. VS 94,900mw/year for bitcoins international protection.

or think about american banks. 90,000 american bank branches with 10pc's per bank branch = 3,942,000mw/year
and thats before including all the HQ's, call centres, clearing houses, ATM's, the mint, fed reserve, nasdaq, and all the security firms offices.

bitcoin international: 95k
las vegas: 400k
american banks: over 4mill

Because they are totalitarian communists disguised as green enviromentalists.

All they want is just a centralized global government with Orwellian powers.

http://www.naturalnews.com/051058_2030_Agenda_United_Nations_global_enslavement.html




They always want you to be preoccupied with the insignificant things , while yes there is a lot of electricity wasted elsewhere.

So people should stop attacking bitcoin, or get the fuck out of here, these anti bitcoin people are not welcome here.

That is an interesting concept. I had some idea related green or, at least, greener equipment solution in the past, but I did not get much support related it. Maybe the trend is changing now, but in my experience people prefer the familiar solution over an innovative, but young technology. It is a kind of paradox since BTC is an innovative, alternative technology too but factors are changing when someone starts to look at BTC as a continous business instead of a long-term investment. Anyway, how are these Chineese miners "greener"? Never heard about this claim.

So they are saying that Bitcoin mining is going to use as much as 30 to 35 TWh of electricity by 2020. That is unbelievable. It is more than 0.1% of the global electricity consumption and at $0.10 per Kwh, it is going to cost at least $2.5 billion.

So do the calculations yourself... $2.5 billion spent on just electricity to mine a total of 656,250 coins. That means that $3,800 in electricity alone is needed to mine just one Bitcoin in 2020. Either the exchange rates will increase by 10X, or the mining sector will collapse.