Bitcoin Forum

Mining process requires high consumption of electricity, as Mark Coppock said: "Bitcoin is far more power intensive than Ethereum when looking at a single transaction, at 163 kilowatt-hours (KWh) versus 49 KWh. That means that a single Bitcoin transaction could power the typical U.S. household for roughly 5.5 days as compared to the 1.5 days of a single Ethereum transaction." So can it be cheaper?

Check article on medium: https://cryptocurrencyhub.io/how-energy-premier-can-help-miners-to-get-better-deals-on-electricity-supply-f378d4cb7dcc (https://cryptocurrencyhub.io/how-energy-premier-can-help-miners-to-get-better-deals-on-electricity-supply-f378d4cb7dcc)

To be fair, miner needs at least $1 per gpu per day to break even, anything more than this is profit, so as long as it is more than $1 per gpu per day then we can say is a fair worldwide mining competition. That is what we say perfect decentralization cause the whole world is trying to find that block. If is less than $1 per gpu per day then only people with cheap electricity will mine and thus we say the decentralization ends there. Bitcoin for example became centralized when only chinese  could mine it cause the electricity there was free at a time, then the gov and power companies found out and started charging it.

So to wrap this up, if is really profitable at $0.40 per kwh then it means the whole world can be part of it, if not then that depends on the user's electricity price.

electricity costs is very important for miners. the cheaper it is, the more profit you get.

In my case, as prices are falling down, keeping my rigs working would mean that i would have to sell all the coins, very cheap indeed, and i would only have enough to pay the bill, becase profit or losses are always going up and down, but electricity bill is always there.

Metroid has said , 1$ por GPU per day. This depends of what you consider profit and your electricity bill. 1$ for me that i live in Spain is simply a no go, since when you change dollar to euro, i get far less because 1$ is like 0,80€.

In my country i would need 2$ per card per day so that when you apply electricity costs i get 1,44$ or 1,17€

the only way i would obtain that right now, would be if my RX 580 could do 63mh/s with only 130W which is impossible. what i call profit is no more here, so that's why my riggs are off.

It's simply a matter of maths. Some will continue mining paying the bill from their pockets because they firmly believe this is a temporary problem that will pass. I don't have that idea and i think this is the end of profitable crypto for a loooooong time. I didn't buy this gpu to pay the electricity from my pocket. I will not go that way.

The fair I said is that the whole world can play the game and try to find the block without playing the game at a loss, so we can say perfect decentralization, but concerning profits, still unfair to whoever has the expensive electricity.

Of course. The problem with bitcoin is that it uses a relatively simple algorithm, the simpler the algorithm the more optimized miners you can create for it and that is bad for energy efficiency.

Example:

1. In a bitcoin ASIC most of the pathways of the chip circuits are used all the time, lets say 10% of transistors are active at any given time because there aren't that many different things that can happen in the algorithm.
2. In an ETH mining gpu, 99% of the transistors are idle and only 1% are being used because there are so many different ways that the algorithm can go.

I'm pulling these percentages out of my ass since nobody really has those figures but the idea remains the same - the simpler the algorithm, the more optimized hardware, the less idle transistors, the higher the energy draw. There is a physical limit as to how many transistors the worlds chip manufacturers can squeeze out and combined with transistor utilization percentage this pushes down the energy cost on more complicated algorithms.

There is an even better example - "PoC" or proof of capacity algorithms which are really just PoW that focus on huge memory sizes. These are mined using hard drives and due to the physical limits of the spinning disk, 99.999..% of the hardware is idling while working at maximum speed. A burst transaction costs ~0.02kWH in electricity and it would still be that low even if burst cost the same as bitcoin because the network has already reached HDD mining supremacy (that is to say that most of the capable hardware out there is mining burst instead of doing something else).

The price of electricity is very different depending on the country. It seems to me that mining will move to countries with cheap electricity. This is a normal situation. When in the world are laws of Economics that any business you will find the possibility for the existence. The problem is that governments often intervene in the economy and disrupt the balance.