Bitcoin Forum

According to my rough figuring at the price of electricity in Europe (18 - 40 cents/kWH?) shouldn't there be a lot of European miners turning off their rigs now?

Either you lose money or hope and pray that Bitcoins move back up in price again before too long.

In Greece we are at 0.087 EUR/KWh. Still bearable.

By my calculations, 1 KWh for a dedicated miner produces 0.06 BTC which is 0.35 EUR currently.

I'm paying about the same here in Thailand, 0.104 US$/kWH. In EU that would be 0.072 /kWH.

But this week I have only been able to maintain about 0.250 BTC/Day @ 360 Watts.

That's 0.250/24/.360 = 0.029 BTC/kWH. Half what you say. It's varied both up and down but it hasn't been very close to the supposed average according to online calculators.

Yeah it's pretty much done over here.  :-\

there are those that have acces to free electricity,yup im thinkin bout myself , but dont have enough $ to create profitable mining rigs.
i only have 1x 5830 mining, and 1x 5870 comming to join.

imagine mining with no costs xcept initial rigs...

If you've got free electricity you'd rather grow pot.

Anyway I call bullshit.

There are plenty of people who have either free electricity from the university where they host their machine or where they work. Not to mention living quarters with flatrate electricity. (of course somebody else is paying for it, so technically it's not free).
 
Or if you invested in solar power, 25k kWh/year gives you plenty of room to run a few miners. Fact, not bullshit.

Well the one is stealing which will get noticed if you consume a significant amount and the other.

And solar power panels are still too expensive their roi is even worse than the mining rigs and I doubt that anyone who writes here and claims free electricity has a high end solar system.

It's quite likely that some european miners have a PV (photovoltaic) system installed - there are lots of funds and grants for this stuff and the ROI is maybe not as good as BTC mining (potentially, with lots of risks!) but FAR more stable and secured. Also manufacturers give up to 30 years of warrranty on panels, the decay is far slower than in the "moore's law" computer world.

Growing pot is illegal, smelly, and hard to sell on. Not everyone wants to get involved in that kind of business.


That's a really stupid phrase BTW.

Claiming to have free electricity is about as stupid, I simply thought I'd return the favor.

People have various reasons why they don't wanna quit but and consider the cost of electricity less of an issue for them under their current circumstances. But claiming that electricity access is free is simply lying to oneself. This may be seen as a way to vindicate ones behavior but it doesn't change the facts.

There are essentially two core mining strategies; mine and liquidate or mine and hold.  Everyone has a given price point at which mining becomes "unprofitable", however at that point you have a choice between two options.  If you're only interested in immediate liquidation your only option is to turn off your rig(s) and wait for the price in whatever your currency du jour to go back up.  So at that point, the real question becomes not "is this still profitable", but "what do you believe about bitcoin?"  You either believe it will succeed and the BTC you're mining now at a "loss" will appreciate in value, or that Bitcoin is a fad and is doomed thus you're not willing to take the risk of a mine and hold strategy.

I would expect some miners to get out of the game at these various price points, but there are some who will continue regardless of the price.

There's no reason to mine if you're in a loss situation. Might as well just buy what you would spend on electricity investing in bitcoin.

Then you are must not be aware that some countries are sponsoring solar systems with stipends, loans and tax brakes, for example 'green certificates' that pay for each 1k kWh produced and loans at 1.7% that pay back for the entire installation after 5 years. Basicly that means the entire install is paid for with a loan that is paid of with green certificates and that means 20 years garanteed production at EUR 0 cost. Beat that...

You under estimate many in the distributed computing community such as Folding at Home, World Community Grid, GPUGRID, M@H, and other BOINC projects. Having my grass roots in those myself and many other's that do such projects at their own expense and enjoy hardware in general. There will away's be those of us backing computational power for projects we believe in regardless of monetary gain. In fact I know many who had plenty of empty pcie slots they have now occupied for mining on already very high end system (EVGA SR-2's etc) to off set there cost and expand even further for F@H, WCG etc. Mining is in many cases helping fund individuals efforts to cure disease's.

Yes i claim that i have free electricity, and it can be dumb only to those who look in envy.
I also dont have to pay water, coz i have my own well, with pumps so that theres no difference from standard supply.
Acces to internet is also free, and all that from the comfort of my own home.

Enjoy your bills, peon.

I don't have free electricity, but I do pay a flat-rate for all I can consume here in Germany :)

And yes, it's at my home.

And I have a Tesla technology atmospheric ether energy generator  :-*

In Latvia $0.2 kW*h, mining not profitable.

As there is NO way to get Euros to an exchange site fast enough befor the price potentially bounces and goes back to profitable, you either need to keep a few day's worth of electricity money on an exchange site and monitor this closely (this costs time, and time is money I loose and have to deduct from these earnings!) or just live with occassional 20 cents of loss on a bad day + shrug it off. If you mine at a constant loss (far below profitability) however, buying is really cheaper and you should stop mining.

Just calculate how much a mined bitcoin costs you (all you need is your MH/s speed, current difficulty + the amount of Watts you use) and decide then if mining is worth it.

I didn't say there wouldn't be people mining, I just said there's no reason for it. If it drops below my threshold I drop off. If the network really looked like it was falling apart I probably would turn on 300mhash/s just to support it though.


Just keep a months worth of electricity costs in EUR at the exchange and setup a buy for a months worth of BTC at your breakeven point. that way you're not even watching the markets.

Define "a significant amount", it doesn't matter if you've got 1 person running 20Ghash or 40 people just running 500Mhash each, the latter probably won't be noticed by landlords or universitys especially if they live in a large dorm where it's split between say 10 people.  I get free electricity in that I don't have to pay it, but be welcome to not believe me it doesn't matter to me if you do.

Well you answered the question yourself pretty much. It's all about expected usage and common sense.

The solution is simple: Price your coins at profitable rates.

Well it's still profitable for people who started early and hoarded them and that's what we are seeing now. This trend will continue until the supply of old coins has permeated through the community which will raise the price automatically. 

It's also still plenty profitable for people that saw the trend early and went for significantly more efficient hardware instead of "LOL MOAR 5830!!!".

In southern Cali, where energy costs is some of the most expensive in the land, it's costing me about $7 (in power costs)
to mine 1 BTC....................

Germany : I get  my Coins from Solar Power like many others here... so wayne

I'm in SoCal too.  Yeah just letting a single 6870 run 24/7 on my main PC bumps my electric bill from $25/month (I live very cheaply with wife, mother-in-law and 2 babies) to $63/month (Tier 4 at $0.33).  If I were to build just 1 farming rig with 4 6870s I would hit Tier 5 and be losing about $5/day   :o

$0.44 in Denmark lol...

Are you guys pricing in the cost of the air conditioning required to cool the extra amount of heat your rigs are cotributing to your living space?  Is there a rule of thumb to price this into one's calculations in wattage?

What airco? Just put the machines spread out over a few rooms and use them to heat the house... That's how I do it here... Not so much fun in July (as it was extremely hot here) but August was a pretty cool month and in September we'll have no need to swich on the heating system

Where I live, it's still hot enough outside to require running the A/C, so until it gets colder outside, any additional heat produced by my rig is an additional cost, because the A/C has to run that much more.

Anyway, the question was more general than that, I'd simply like to know a way to calculate this additional cost using a rule o thumb of some sort.

In Texas it was 110 on Sunday, 107 on Monday, and today's supposed to be 103.

We're on track to set a record this year for "the most days over 100".

So I discovered mining in late May, on the cusp of the hottest summer on record. Sweet.  ::)

Don't worry, though, because whether it was averaging 85 outside or 105, the heat produced by your mining rig was still only going to cost you the exact same amount on your A/C bill!

We used in the past a induction current meter to monitor our airco as it's hooked in with a 3 phase cable to the office. It sucked so much power we decided to junk our old servers and replace them with low power units.

Observe your consumption for a day without computer equipment running and compare it to day with the equipment running at the same weather conditions?

In general I'd just note the meter for the entire setup (including miners, airco and house hold consumption) and if you can't break even, it's not worth it. That is not taking in account the writeoff cost of the mining equiment, purly the power consumption. If you can't break even (including the household consumption), you are making a loss.

Lucky for me I have free electricity :D Although in a year I won't so I have to make the most of it...
inb4 "Your a lier"
inb4 "You don't actually have 'free' electricity"
blah blah blah

This. Man i'm considering in splurging on a bigger A/C to compensate for the added heat in my "computer room", it is currently running for 16h a day so i can survive this heat, that's 21KW/h a day and my humble 4 card rig is using 21.6KW/h a day, thats 42.6KW/h to generate 0.5BTC on average. Thank God in Venezuela we pay $0.011 per KW/h ;)

Tell us your secret then.

He's probably in some form of student shared housing. Quite commonly they'll have a fixed monthly rate. I had that back when I was in university. The free electricity is averaged out over a large number of rooms. Someone is paying but most likely it's future students who will have a higher rent.

This situation isn't scalable and time limited. When I was in school we had three student towers with 1440 rooms. Fixed $210/month rent (back in the 80s!). No metering of utilities.

Essentially this ^£70 a week with all bills included. I suppose if you were to be really pedantic then I don't actually get 'free' electricity as such as its included in that fee... however that gets paid with my student loan and £70 per week is tiny compared to what most students have to pay... my friend pays around £200 per week without any bills included...
Although I don't have a huge operation, only a few GH/s, so I don't know if there would be an investigation if I were to use a shitload of power lol. On top of this my department generally uses top of the range ATI cards so I let one mine when I'm working.
The joys of being a student :P Although as BkkCoins said it is time-limited... so I won't have this in a years time when I graduate. Although I never saw my mining as a long-term pursuit so that doesn't bother me.

Hi,

I googled around and many articles refer Latvia has a place with low-priced electricity  ???


Regards.

Electricity itself aint the problem, but the goddamn taxes they put over it are!

47% of total costs here in .nl are taxes, rest is basic electricity!

And the power plant pays takes too, their employees do and their contracts and so on.
The figure actually closer to 90%

Smug solar miner checkin in  ;D

As someone who doesn't pay attention to detail (it's "kWh" not "KW/h" ;) ), you are almost certainly in error.

- Either the extra zero is a typo and you are in fact paying $0.11 per kWh
- Or $0.011/kWh is the generation cost and excludes the delivery cost, or vice versa (to know your effective rate, take your total amount billed and divide by our total kWh consumed)

Consider also that $0.011/kWh would be at or below the production cost of almost any hydroelectric dam in the world, including the Guri dam in Venezuela, which supplies 73% of the electricity in your country.

Talking about Venezuela...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Venezuela-raises-electricity-apf-2525496835.html?x=0&.v=1

People there will have a hard time mining if the govt actually penalizes users who aren't reducing use rather than adding more.

Thanks for the education of NORWAY not being on this planet. They get most of their power from dams, and the power costs often are in the 3 cents / kwh range. 11 is terribly high for hydro.

Noway's 2009 average price per residential kWh in 2009 was almost $.15us. Their industrial power isn't even close to 3 cents/kWh.

Note that the post from Venezuela is saying 1.1 cents not 11 cents...
and if you look at the power costs reported by wikipedia 11 cents is still pretty low for most places in comparison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing

The lowest reported there is 3 cents in Ukraine. I'm guessing they use hydro too because without hydro power is typically higher. Nuclear power being amongst the highest cost.

Yep. NetTecture needs too to pay attention to details ;)


Actually nuclear when done right is amongst the cheapest. Hydro is the cheapest. Nuclear second. Then coal/gas/wind/solar/etc.

As a matter of fact, France can generate most of its electricity so cheaply (because 80% is from nuclear power) that it has an economic incentive to resell it to its neighboring countries, which it does, making it one of the world's largest electricity exporter (some sources say the largest). Unfortunately these low costs are not passed to domestic users (they pay 0.12 EUR/kWH or 0.17 USD/kWh) I guess because of additional taxes... Compare to wholesale electricity prices in France which are 0.042 EUR/kWh or 0.059 USD/kWh: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C_EDF_wholesale_electricity_price_set_200411a.html

You got me in one thing, i don't know how to calculate power usage, i just tried to figure it out on my own, i thought that since it is the amount of kW consumed in an hour then it must be KW/h. is that wrong? please correct me if it is.

What i DO know for sure is how much i pay for the electricity and how much it is per kWh (right?), in the power bill it says 0.1Bs (Venezuelan VEF) per kWh. The exchange rate is fixed by the govt to 4.30VEF per USD but there is the black market rate at 8.60VEF. i think my mistake was using the black market rate because i think it is the REAL/MARKET rate so 0.1/8.6=0.011, but with the govt rate that will be 0.023

Nice homework there in the guri dam thing but i live in the west part of the country (the remaining 27%?) where we have gasoline thermoelectric generators and since we pay 0.115VEF each litre of gasoline (yes, that's right 0.05USD each gallon) the price of electricity is a bit on the high side, with a litre of gasoline you could generate up to 9.7kWh (http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Energy_density (http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Energy_density)) i guess the rest are operating costs.


I just read that article but you failed to read "Venezuela's biggest energy consumers -- industrial firms, large businesses and shopping malls -- must reduce consumption by 10 percent during a month-long period" that law is not going to be applied to residential consumers

let's keep the thread about electricity costs, mining profitability and our own experiences with both in the place we live not in politics and politicians. shall we?

If I'm corrent then Latvia imports more electricity than it exports. That certainly drives up the price.
Energy costs €.11/kWh in Estonia until 2013 when energy markets open completely, that mean 30% - 50% rise overnight.

0.33$/kwh here in germany
quit mining weeks ago even though it was still profitable

Sounds like a great place to setup mining. I certainly wasn't talking about politics. I have no interest in it and live in Thailand myself so have no gripe with VZ. What I don't understand is why that article says this,

"Jaua told a news conference that residential customers will be charged an additional fee totaling 75 percent of their monthly bill if they do not reduce their electricity use by at least 10 percent as compared to the same month in 2009. The surcharge applied to individuals increases to 100 percent or more if the monthly consumption exceeds previous usage by 10 percent."

but you say they it won't affect residential customers. Even if you paid double it's still damn cheap.

It is wrong. kWh is the number of kW multiplied by the length of time you consumed them for. Eg. if you draw 0.5kW for 2h, that will amount to 1kWh. You were consuming 0.5kW the first hour, 0.5kW the second hour, yet it was never "0.5kW/h", the total energy consumed was 1kWh.


At first your calculations look correct. But my friend's power bill, in the US, shows $0.10/kWh, yet he pays $0.17/kWh. This is because in another part of the bill, distribution charges are added ($0.06/kWh), and taxes ($0.01/kWh). My point is, reading all the fine print is hard. I don't know what your bill look like, so I am suggesting something simpler:
- how much did you pay for the last billing period (in VEF)?
- how much did you consume for the last billing period in kWh?
Surely your bill must show these 2 numbers, right? Divide the first number by the second one.


;) This is scarily low, and might explain your rate.

Kind of off-topic, but I am genuinely surprised and confused by this black market rate... I assume the local population favor the dollar over the bolívar, right? Why would they spend 8.6 VEF to get 1 USD on the black market, when they could just bring 4.3 VEF to a bank following the official rate?

Edit: Apparently dollars are rationed by CADIVI, so the population turns to the black market to obtain them. Makes sense...

mrb, if you look at my first post you can see that what you just explained to me is exactly what i came up with, the only wrong thing was the nomenclature of the unit.

taking a look at the last power bill there are other charges, but they are fixed or non dependant on the amount of power billed, in a 103.67VEF bill for 986kWh, 4VEF for "fuel adjustment" whatever that means, and 1.06VEF from the billing service itself. No taxes

OFF-TOPIC


gasoline is way cheaper than water here, we have more gasoline than water though


he said that, he will not execute, election year, populism, politics, i don't want to talk about it.

about it being a good place to mine, i think it is. Maybe i should start offering those services i've seen around here were people rent their mining hardware, i could mine for someone in let's say latvia or germany and it could be profitable for both. haha

Ok.

So even after these fixed taxes, your effective rate is $0.024/kWh assuming the official VEF/USD exchange rate, or $0.012/kWh assuming the black market one. This is indeed heaven for a miner. You can thank your country's gigantic petroleum reserves for that :) I guess the only risks/unknowns of setting up a massive mining operation in Venezuela would be availability of GPUs and other computer hardware (I know nothing of it), and stability of hardware & electricity prices (I heard of a +20% inflation rate?)

coming close to 30% inflation, but i don't think it hurts mining at all when you buy hardware in USD/BTC. i buy mostly at amazon since its the only one accepting non-us credit cards.

i think i can keep mining down to $1/BTC before pulling the plug at current difficulty

From someone in the UK paying £1.40/litre for petrol and £0.18/kWh I can't express how jealous I am right now.  :D

Mining for me will become unprofitable very soon but that doesn't phase me, I will still continue to support the network, sometimes it not always about the money. I've been running F@H for near on 3 years now.

I feel your pain apart from its £1.30/litre where I am :)

you lucky guys  ;)
Petrol is "only" 1.35£/litre  but energy is over £0,22/Kwh here
And mine is only really a matter of faith in a future jump of BTC value (mine with a 400MHash/sec hw can produce 5-6BTC/month at current difficulty but costs you easily 50-60£/month)

you guys are lucky too, here i f i want to buy a high-end graphics card i need to spend 20days of income

The core point of mining is not yielding BTC.

You definitely have the gift of teaching, thanks for your explanation, i knew i'd heard it somewhere b4... high-school feels like it was a million years ago

+100 :)

And if diff keeps going up (lets say only 2% a month), you will dig less and less BTC every month.

Let me give you a depressing calculation here (BTC price is kept same for simplicity)
This is calculation is based on a 400Mhas 24/7 mining.  http://striketeam.ath.cx/btccalc/btccalc.php

     

All that bullshit for 360.468 USD minus expenses? :)

www.bitcoinx.com/charts/

How did your difficulty reach 3 million, when it is currently dropping? You can pull numbers out of the assholes and make it appear any way you want. You will NEVER know the future difficulty or the future bitcoin price, your assumptions are based on telling me you know both factors withing marginal error. What you could do at most is offer a probabily scenario involving some possible value ranges for the two factors and offer analysis for specific values.

BombaUcigasa, no need to get all hysterical and start stuffing dynamite up your ass.


Are you on crack? I just posted a scenario, where diff crawls 2% per month. Relax, adjust your tinfoil hat and next time read the post twice, before you start screaming. 


Lets me write that out for you in larger letters and let me also add some nice bold fonts for you.

And if diff keeps going up (lets say only 2% a month), you will dig less and less BTC every month.

Its just a prediction and as good/bad as any other hypothetical scenario.
5 months ago diff was around ~0.7mill, now its at ~1.7 mill! ~245%? in 5 months.
5 months ago people where certain that by September 2011, the price will be 60+ USD IF the diff keeps going up at same rate.
Doh. we are at sub 6 USD bid :)

Go and have fun with this calculator and if you have problems with the results,  go and act like a shit bird over at this thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=17350.0

Here is one more cool calculator http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

But it is going down now... You clearly lack reading skills. Please review my post again.

Your mining calculator link is useless because of the reasons I explained. Please use the chart I linked instead to get an overview of when/how mining is profitable. "Any prediction" is not equal to any other prediction, so don't beat on my prediction then claim yours are superior somehow, even after you agree with me that the price and difficulty are unpredictable. What is predictable is the profitability ratio, clearly seen in the graphs I linked to. I predict that the average mining costs will not exceed long term values 200% of a bitcoin's value, and they will also not go below 20%.

It is thus IRRELEVANT how much absolute BTC your machine makes and using bitcoin value (as your bitcoin supply is absolutely fixed) as an indicator if it's good or bad to do x or y, is an exercise of imagination and should not be used in a rational decision.

It is completely RELEVANT to know the ratio of price/cost of your produced BTC to make decision calls about your present and future mining activities, as this ratio is co-dependent of both the price and network hash rate.

And please, refrain from being a dick, I did not ask you to leave nor did I imply that you are a substance abuser.

And I think your allowance will drop a little bit when they get their electricity bill  ;D

I'm in Scandinavia, I'm at 0.06USD/kWH. Break even point for me is USD/BTC = 2.2.

Your parents might not notice the extra electricity cost, as you only have 276 MH/s.

But neither are you making very much -- only 1/7th of a BTC per day. What, about 80 cents?

Don't spend it all in one place kid :)

Hell, better than nothing... one coin's worth per week to blow in the local arcade or mall... nice :)

It says he's mining at BTC guild, but he's offline right now.

Maybe he's grounded today, or mom & dad got their first post-mining electric bill?

If you're mining and holding, you're speculating. You should view yourself as being in two separate businesses = producing and speculating - and should account for each of those separately. Each may be profitable or unprofitable, and should be continued or stopped on its own merits.