Bitcoin Forum

Just curious how many miners pay for their electricity.  Paying means you have a variable electricity cost, so if you are on a fixed cost, like included in the rent, consider it "free" for this poll.

Results are what I would have predicted.

If you are a casual miner or maybe have a single dedicated rig you can get away w/ "free" electricity.

Outside of botnets it gets very tough to sustain any serious mining operation on "free" power.  The person doing the subsidizing tends to notice and they tend to view any such subsidy outside the terms of the lease.

>5 GH/s I pay for electricity

Not enough results yet to draw firm conclusions. Also botnets arent voting I think :)

I'm glad the largest group of people mine "just for fun" with under a GH. That gives me still alot of hope for bitcoin.

Since big miners will run the first if prices don't recover we would still have a fairly secure and usable network :)/me is mining at a loss @ 280mh

oh wow that works  :o ;D

I am mining at a profit with 1.3 gigahash. I have yet to mine not at a profit, in fact. Especially considering the free heat.

during test, near 3G rig is running, cost 120watt :D

Wow that's almost 25 MH/W.  I think that is the best FPGA design yet (non-existent and unavailable for testing unicorns excluded of course).

If you include people who's parents pay or their electricity in "free" electricity, I think that's doing a disservice to the question.

1-5GH...at a loss  8)

I disagree, this poll will simply show the correlation between those running programs/graphics cards to mine and which of those are directly responsible for the electricity bill.

25-30MH/W is typical for Spartan6 FPGAs. I'm seeing ~6W @ 180MH/s.

-rph

So you basically want the poll to skew for nerds living in mom's basement and children?

Since they also "skew" the bitcoin network hashrate, I dont see why not.

Paying $0.07/kw @ 10gh/s

sorry, there are some math mistakes. 1.8G @ 100W, i re-tested them today.

Fair enough... I'm not sure what data this will represent in the end though?  What about people like me who pay for part of my hashrate at residential rates and part of it is already factored into my datacenter rental price that I already pay for other reasons?

The reality is the reality.  If 10% of the network is powered via free "mom's basement" electricity then 10% is powered.  The pool while not scientific does show some insight into what % of the network is run by people who don't need to worry about operating cost.

It is useful in understanding how hashing power will change when price of BTC changes or when reward halves etc.

What is interesting and somewhat predictable is the inverse relationship between % of miners using free electricity and hashing power.

Free electricity = more common w/ small rigs/farms.

Pick whichever you feel is more relevant, or pick at random. As DnT said, its not a scientific study, just something to get a rough idea.

I pay for electric, that's why I stopped mining recently.