Bitcoin Forum

Just came across this, published last month, but don't recall seeing anything like it on the forum, so just sharing.

Original article by 911 Metallurgist, it's got the rates for some other crypto too but I'm just going to share the one for Bitcoin: Cost to mine 1 Bitcoin in every country (https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/the-cost-to-mine-different-cryptocurrencies-in-every-country).


I knew Asia was expensive, but not THAT expensive. Also, I think this is the cost of grid electricity. I know in my part of the world, for example, some miners want to experiment with natural gas generators. Far, far cheaper, no one would plug into the grid!

Kuwait, though!

This is a very interesting graphic since it shows at what price a miner would be selling his coins for and therefore it does influence the market quite a lot. What I think is a big problem is that they don't show the power costs that they actually used to calculate this. In many countries the cost of power can be very different for companies and private persons, so if they don't say the calculate with for example 0,25 USD per KWH then its is not as helpful as it could have been.

But the methodology is based on cost of power -- you can open the original link shared and dig in deeper. Which is why I commented that this pricing isn't entirely accurate, it's only based on commercial consumption cost by directly connecting to power grids. As you know, not all miners would do that, and not all miners pay the same rates -- like it used to be in China, where they'd be able to negotiate independent rates with state energy providers. If the other stats are true (like from Bitcoin Policy Institute (https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/61d2416d1d63f07ecbfd010c/61e06fd0387be5288a07d9d6_Climate%20Organizaions%20Crypto%20Letter-01-13-01.pdf) numbers) then most miners already are on renewables and alternative energy sources -- so I doubt most of them are paying these rates.

The data's just indicative of how much you'd pay if you just decided to plug in and mine.

And at least for the US it's using numbers that are very distorted and many times flat out incorrect. Many states have different prices for power in different areas. Discounts for agreed contracted amounts and tons of other variables.
There are other countries that power is cheap but unreliable, I mean they put in North Korea where most people don't have power and except for limited exceptions it's not reliable.
Pretty map but pointless in the end. Not to mention as we all know electricity although a big part is only 1 part of the cost.

-Dave

This is very good information. to mine crypto in the developing should be the number one place mining should be very costly but from the link you provided, it looks as if they are even more less. mostly Nigeria, which I know very sure that they have not slept with 24/7 hours light and the Map  esteemated it as $22.303. This amount for Nigeria is confusing me because if it is power that is used to determine the cost of mining then Nigerian should be even the number one in the list. Africa is blessed with natural resources even gas but irony is the case.

please note I fixed some typos

if you have A S19 THAT DOES 100th and burns 3 kwatts an hour you pretty much have a top of the line unit.

numbers below leave out:
 labor
 repairs
 coin price change
 power price change
 cooling
 infrastructure
 rise or fall in difficulty

also I assume your miner was fully paid off

00 cent power with a 100th machine burning 3kwatts cost is $0.00 it earns $8.81   net $8.81
01 cent power ------------------------------------------------- $0.72  it earns $8.81  net $8.09
02 cent power –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––- $1.44  it earns $8.81   net $7.37
03 ---------------------------------------------------------------- $2.16 it earns $8.81   net $6.65
04 ---------------------------------------------------------------- $2.88 ------------------net $5.93
05 -----------------------------------------------------------------$3.60 ------------------net $5.21
06 -----------------------------------------------------------------$4.32 ------------------net $4.49
07 -----------------------------------------------------------------$5.04 ------------------net $3.77
08------------------------------------------------------------------$5.76 ------------------net $3.05
09 -----------------------------------------------------------------$6.48 ------------------net $ 2.33
10-----------------------------------------------------------------$7.20 -------------------net $1.61
11 ---------------------------------------------------------------- $7.92 ------------------net $0.89



I can tell you since all the costs left out are at least 1 dollar.

  a ton of s19 gear is not paid off many big miners are near death.

As for what it cost per country please in my PA/NY/NJ area alone (just 3 of 50 states) I have over 20 different power points to chose from some over 22 cents some under 6 cents and many in-between,


Now if you put in the gear cost a s19 that does 100th at 3kwatts cost 3,000 to 9,000 dollars

today it may be 4,000 so do I add that cost in? If I do and has 3 cent power. with it not breaking  it makes $5.93 so 4000 to the cost  or wait 675 days of mining to pay it off

and don't count the 4,000 cost to buy it.


But the chart you found does look good. and my thread is jus t a lot of boring black and white type and blank space.

This whole study is bullshit, electricity price in Kuwait is 6.5 cents per kWh for "undefined manufacturing" which is where bitcoin falls under, which means even while using the most advanced gear you are nowhere near the 1.4k cost mentioned in this "study".

Using the household prices it ranges from 1.6 cents to 5 cents, but long story short, once you pass 9 KWh a MONTH (which every asic miner will do in a few hours) you jump to the 5 cents tier, the 1.6 cents is for below 3 kWh a month, that isn't enough to mine a fraction of bitcoin, but ya, I understand why they had these numbers incorrect, most people who write such content are lazy, and they still get paid for writing nonsense like that.

I don't know the prices of other countries mentioned in the study, but I am sure that most will be incorrect, so it's safe to assume that this whole thing is just b.s.

Agreed and since it's just talking about electric rates it leaves off a lot of other factors, some of which Phil touched on above and others that I have discussed in the past. Climate plays a large part. It's better to pay more for electric and mine in a cooler environment to keep cooling costs down vs. cheaper rates but keeping the chillers running full blast all the time.

Reliability and cost of internet. Yes most of us here can run our miners off of a cable modem or whatever. The big players have multiple fiber connections and run their own BGP.

And so on.

-Dave

The main problem I have is gear cost.

Pretend I have free power .

When I live in an apartment I had an illegal 10 gauge 240 power source in my apartment.

Did not know about it until we had a huge black out in NYC my entire neighbor hood was black and my ac worked. I found out at that time

this was in the 90's so mining was not a thing.

I knew a guy that did forged jewelry and  that his basement workplace in a Manhattan skyscraper has a tunnel to a 3000 square foot space with about 300 amps of 240 watt power.

Back in the 80's so mining was not being done.

But people with 'free' power and the ability to say run 20 s19's would do 2ph a day which is only

176 usd  day so 21000/176 = 120 days 1 bitcoin  but that gear at best price cost 20 x 4000=

80000 the study leaves that cost out.  So the first btc would be 80k with everything being free but the gear

2 btc would be 80k
3 btc would be 80k
4 btc would be 80k.  and you could argue this means a single btc = 20k cost.

that study leave all this out.

and all of us know that to think 20 s19's will work with out fail for 4 x 119 days is very optimistic.

Hard to disagree with any of the points brought up, but I did think the chart (and the other information in the link) was an okay starting point -- a lot more useful than having no data on electricity costs. But probably far less useful to someone who actually would want to start mining.

I strongly agree climate plays a role, I know first-hand the debilitating effects on hardware in tropics (heat is one problem but humidity is often overlooked and in some cooler countries the humidity causes problems on a machine that runs non stop). On the other hand, cost of repairs could be far cheaper in some countries with low energy cost anyway, and that could actually offset better than say, insurance and maintenance in more expensive countries.

I guess a true cost calculation is extremely difficult, gear and maintenance, licensing even (approvals to run commercial enterprise or even specialised equipment).

Yup, the rest of the charts are bullshit. Most countries use tiered (or step) pricing. Past a certain amount, you're forced to pay more than the typical range for a household. If you registered as a manufacturer/business, you pay in time of use (depending on the time of day, 10PM-4AM is usually the cheapest). Some countries even use the mix of both, tiered within TOU. There is a lot of things that need to take into account for electricity pricing, not just fixed rate.

This is the only source of U.S. power cost which is somewhat reliable:
Why do I say it's somewhat reliable? Because the mining farm locations and power rates that I know of so far correlate with the green areas. This is from public mining farms as well as my personal experience.

https://findenergy.com/

The map displays average residential rate by county, which obviously doesn't include cheaper tariffs that may be available or tiered usage plans. But it's a good starting point to find industrial power. Simply divide the residential price by 2 to get a rough estimate. The exceptions to this rule I can find so far are upstate NY (divide by 3), Long Island (divide by 1.5), Northern NJ/JCPL (divide by 1.5), Central Washington (divide by 1), Delaware (divide by 1.5).

Of course, the recent natural gas price hike is not included, which you'll have to pay for eventually, so use with caution.

Are those natural gas generators actually safe to operate with the amount of power being drawn, without being a fire hazard?

[that is assuming that you've found a dry place outside to host it, as it is not safe to run a generator indoors, from what I have read.]

I know that it is based on power cost, but I would like to see the actual power cost on the graphic. Since this way this is basically a comparison of the electricity prices in every country without telling you what actually the price of the electricity is.

I've only seen one up close, but seen many models for sale only in Southeast Asia. China (duh) and Japan pretty much make hi-tech models, Japan buys gas from my island, actually we still produce way too much and it all gets burnt off (flaring), so demand still a long way off from supply.

They're always outside! Don't look much different from diesel generators, except you pipe in the gas from a separate canister unit (we don't have piped gas AFAIK in most of SEA).

These things are BIG and never ran in enclosed areas.. How big? Well for reference and assuming 100% conversion efficiency 1HP=0.7456999 kw of power so for 250kw you will need at least a 336HP engine. Yes some of the largest can provide several MW of power 24x7x365.

Why would you even think there is fire hazard? I'd be more concerned about clueless amateur wiring between the generator and point of usage...
Here is a nice link on Prime power generators (https://ckpower.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-prime-power-generators/) and what they are all about - huge differences between them and the more common standby-power gensets.

This!
Every single time I hear about the cost of mining a BTC I go from a peaceful panda to an angry grizzly wanting to reap some new ventilation holes in some fine part of the author's body.


Grab the average electricity price from a chart online, fill the first table in excel, grab the specs of a miner, fill the second row, and wow, you have numbers on how expensive mining a bitcoin is! Majic!!!
Hope this image is sized right (32 inch screen at work) :
https://i.snipboard.io/nShJ8f.jpg


Those are numbers for March, half of the world would be mining at a loss, now and if I get the numbers right I'm mining now at about $55k per coin.
Much revenue, such profits, wow bankruptcy!


Some think of them as those individual generators that you have in your house for backup solutions when the grid is down.
Those real gas powered generators are indeed damn reliable, our largest logistic center was finished before an underground line that need to go under a river was finished by the electric company, so two monsters systems each with 3MW supplied the power for about 3 months, 24/7 with not a single failure.
But god, the noise and the heat, you couldn't hear trucks rushing in and out of the gates when you were standing near them.

Haha aye, my state (1 of 14 in my country) produces so much natural gas we've been flaring them since as long as I can remember, more chimneys flaring over the years -- and I'm quite old.

Have had fantasies of using it all up with a few of those power generators, make a deal to power share off all that wasted gas. They really are quite intensive mfs, but I've never seen them in use anywhere else, and from the responses on the thread, yeah I guess most of the world won't recognise them. I'd say they're fairly new tech, but I'm far from being an expert

Why not, what could possibly go wrong? I mean the worst-case scenario is ending with a "study" that is complete bullshit, not the end of the world, and they still get paid for doing the excel sheet trick. :D


Honestly, it will be near impossible to know the exact cost of mining bitcoin using just the public information you find on Google, nobody knows exactly how much it costs someone else to mine a bitcoin, simply because, you don't know how much they pay for power, bribe, maintenance and all that, even the simplest part of the equation which is the $/kWh is not easy to figure out, nobody has an answer for how much it cost the large U.S miners, some might have 2 cents rate, some maybe 4 cents, some might magically have access to free power, some might be paying 7 cents and pretend to be paying only 3.5 cents to attract more investors to buy their stocks, nobody has the slightest clue.

With that in mind, why waste time trying to figure out the cost of mining bitcoin when all the variables you need to place in the equation are missing, guessing won't take you anywhere, you will look as dumb as the guys who conducted this "study", I mean we can speculate and chit-chat about how do I think 3-4 cents the average for large U.S miners, but then I will give you a bag of salt to take it with, I won't go to as far as making claims and studies regarding the subject.

The annoying problem with this kind of "study" is that they lead to a second "expert" opinion on price.
You would be amazed how many times I've seen people saying that since the average cost to mine a  BTC is 30 000 there is no way in hell Bitcoin could go below this price, since, I don't know, we will break some rule of the universe if we do so.


Quoting this just for the underlined part, yeah ;D, love the nice touch you need there.

I think the only real price quote we can get is for individuals, or for public traded companies, they have to fill expenses and revenue, so if they say we have paid x and we have mined y bitcoins we could approximate, but even so, we don't know if they had the same hashrate all the time, if the power cost were the same, we don't know a lot of stuff. So if it makes a subject to discuss when you're bored or you think that crunching numbers over and over will get you somewhere, yeah it's a nice time killer but I don't think anything will come out of it. And even if we knew it....


Well, don't look at me, we're running low on gas even in our gas pipes around here :D  so probably I'll be one of the last people seeing one around here.

Ya, that sounds really ridiculous, even if you were to very accurately calculate the average worldwide cost for mining BTC, it does not mean the price can't go below that, for many reasons but i will just list two.

1- Newly mined coins make only a fraction of the available supply, if it costs miners 15k it doesn't mean other people who own bitcoin won't sell it for 10k!
2- When the mining cost exceeds a certain level, some miners will drop and thus reducing the global average cost, say it's 15k now, if we fall to 10k in price, enough miners will shut down to make it profitable for the remaining, there will always be someone who mines bitcoin as long as it's the price is above 0, even if price dropped to a fraction of a cent, one guy would be mining it with his old Nokia.

The only number that any asset can't go below would be 0, with the exception of things like oil contracts. :D

 

From this study, it becomes clear that mining Ethereum is much more profitable than Bitcoin, although in reality this is not the case. In most countries, it turns out that bitcoin mining is not profitable, and there are still many miners there. Apparently the analytics is not very accurate.

What you guys think about Braiins approach of calculating the cost of production of 1 Bitcoin on their site? I see they end up mixing CAPEX with OPEX, but I can agree with the approach at least until we don't reach ROI.
The values are quite different from what I saw in the OP link.

https://insights.braiins.com/en/cost-to-mine/

They are still assuming free gear.

but they are accurate if your gear is free.

Most every calculator has fails

Think that their method is missing the cost to buy the gear..
think that their power price includes repairs, labor , infrastructure.

then they are accurate.

I like to add a penny or 2 to the power cost to cover all bs other than gear cost.

so if you have 3 cent power bill and a cent or 2 and your running cost is 4-5 cents.

that cover everything but the purchase price.

now 1000 ph is 10 s19's. cost is 4000  if you get them now times 10 = so 40k in the hole.

1000 ph of s19's burns 10 x 3.3kwatts or 33kwatts an hour or  792 k-watts a day lets say 800k-watts daily

at 5 cent complete run  cost that is 40 usd
at 10 cent complete run cost that is 80 usd

1000 ph earns $93.80

so at 5 cent run cost you make 93.80-40 = $53.80
and at 10 cent run cost you make 93.80-80 = $13.80 a day

so both look like winners. well do not forget the 40,000 you spent for the gear.

so 40,000/53.80 = 743 days to pay the gear off and yet to earn any profit at 5 cent full run cost which is about 3 -4 cent power rest for things i mentioned above.

worse 40,000/13.80 = 2898 days to pay the gear = no good at all.



and that is top end gear grabbed cheaply with 3 cent to 4 cent power round up to 5 cents total run cost.

So right now mineing is terrible unless you have paid off gear.

the braiins site is not making that clear.

Allow me some clarifications


Why do you say this?


Do you meant


What is the meaning of "ph"??

What you mean by complete run cost here??

When I know the answers for my questions, I think I can understand the remaining numbers!
Thanks
dkVtX

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I Hope this helps

I live in usa
I like to add 2 cents to my power company price

If I lived in a low cost spot
I would add 1 cent

so power bill 3 cents + 2 in my USA case

but maybe

power bill 3 cents + 1 cent in Malaysia case

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All of the above is a way to use the calculator you linked work more accurately .

To me the hardest thing is not calculating run cost.

as I think it is

power from power company
repairs
labor
infrastructure
maybe insurance
maybe breakage and not repairable gear.


The hard thing is once you get that number.  say it is 10 s19j's earn $53.80 a day after full run cost.

 How do I account for that 4000 a unit purchase price 10 s19's cost at best $40,000

Thanks, I got the numbers! Really hard to mine if you don't have energy really cheap.

Yeah cheap power and luck are big factors if you want to mine at 20kwatts an hour or more. 20 watts is around 6 s19's which means it is out of reach for almost every homeowner.

and it is only earning 6 x 100 x 9.4 cents = $56.40 per day.  Before any and all costs.

Interesting. And yet most mining as far as I know comes from Kasachstan? I wonder if there will be a shift soon? I do have a problem with the flimsy methodology on the calculations. Mining costs are not only electricity+miners. They completely ignored internet costs, the renting of mining space, various business and regulatory fees (licenses), etc?

Also, North Korea? Really?  ;D ;D ;D - Oh boy, they did not calculate the most important costs of mining in NK: the costs to smuggle the hardware and yourself in, the bribe money for the soldiers to keep quiet and ultimately the price of a single bullet for one's own execution.  ::) :P

Anyway, not a serious "study". Just a gimmick with a nice chart.

Almost everyone does the math right, it's really pretty simple, takes a few seconds to calculate, and once you know parameters it just doesn't get easier, it's 5th-grade math at best, but what EVERYONE doesn't have is a crystal ball, if difficulty doubles half way it means only the first half of your bitcoin matches the current figures, the other half will be 2x more difficult which makes the overall calculation off by 50%.

Also, none of the parameters used in the equation is constant, not even the power rate we pay today is guaranteed to be the same next month, so you have an ever-changing difficulty figure, a variable power cost, other unknown costs, all of these models are hardly accurate, you can save today's numbers and look at them a year later, you will laugh at how inaccurate they were.

An example, many people who bought the 17 series when they first landed thought they would recover their investment in 6 months, it has been almost 3 years now, most of them are yet to see ROI (including myself), if you told anyone the same shit back then, they would think you are crazy, if you tell someone today that paying 0.25 BTC for S19 is going to look terrible next year, they will laugh at you.

So long story short, nobody knows how much it will really cost anybody (not even themselves) to mine bitcoin.

It's a calculator, the only difference is that it shows you how long it will take you and what cost till you mine exactly 1 BTC.
They basically show you how much you pay a day and calculate the revenue in satoshi, unlike traditional profitability calculators (they have one too).

The thing is that you still have to insert the hashrate, the power consumption, the electricity price, things that you know for yourself, but a thing that nobody knows for an entire country, even the price per kWh, let alone the number of different gears. Of course, you could say, I'm in Germany I have 40cents per kWh, I have an S19j it cost me this to mine a BTC but that doesn't make it a rule for the entire country. As I said previously, on those numbers I wouldn't be mining at all.

Oh, something interesting from the previous calculator:


This is just lol material, 3 countries known for mining would be mining at a loss now.


Kazakhstan was never ranked number 1, and with current events there I think it will be close to impossible to rank 1 even if we break the US by states.

I was under the impression that China was proxying its Bitcoin mining to Kasachstan as its nearest neighbor. Maybe I was wrong in thinking that? Or perhaps I was thinking of something else.

I agree with the current events being extremely detrimental to the mining potential in Kasachstan. Not only did they suffer power outages and political conflict with a coup attempt shortly before the start of Russia's war in Ukraine.

I do still have hopes for the potential in Kasachstan.

Even miners within the same region or utility coverage area can have vastly different rates. Some of them can be on a fixed long-term contract for 3-4 cents while others pay public tariff rates of 5-6 cents. The GWh they signed to are already a sunk cost, so the marginal cost of their power is zero. Therefore, these big corp-o-mines will always continue mining even if BTC is $5k. Even if they went bankrupt, some private equity fund would gobble up the entire warehouse for pennies, but the ASICs would keep mining!

ditto. Mining is essentially exchanging electrical for a digital asset. Therefore, the lower cost the better because the digital asset can yield more.

I'm surprised Nigeria doesn't seem to be on the list of counties that cost the least to mine bitcoin. Considering how much energy Nigeria as a country has. But it could also be that there aren't so many people that mine bitcoin like the other countries.

__

Esther

This is very interesting, I’m wondering how could you or who ever got this informations, you really made me think about mining since i live in the second most less expensive country to mine bitcoin or etherum which is algeria country.
The only problem now is how to get the necessary tools and devices to start mining, since our government is really strict about these devices and most of the time are getting  by customs. And if i got those devices the question is how how much time it will take to mine 1 bitcoin or 1 etherum using the most recent and best device on market.

How accurate is this info guys - the prices in my county have been raising by the day, soon it is not going to be profitable to mine at all - BTC price low - electricity price sky high every day... soo where do we go from here?
 :( ??? :-X

Holy Molly,
Venezuela is expensive as hell  :o