Power is definitely the biggest expense for most miners.
For us, pool choice is more about reliability than squeezing out a tiny fee difference. Good uptime and low rejects add up over time.
I’d rather not say our exact power rate but we are running comfortably still. As for the halving, we're just focusing on efficiency and stacking BTC. I agree that if BTC price stays where it is and difficulty keeps climbing, 5¢ power gets a lot harder to make work.
Don't mention the price of electricity if it could compromise your interests.
Recent reports from large US companies showed a minimum price of 4 cents, but this is likely just accounting data and not the actual price.
In Russia, if you operate legally, the price is currently 6-8 cents, depending on the volume consumed. You can only get 4 cents by installing your own transformers, which step down from 10,000 volts to 220.
That’s another reason why mining economics can look very different from the outside.
Two operations can be running the same hardware and mining on the same pool, but a difference of just a few cents per kWh completely changes the economics.
In that situation, it’s interesting that miners still spend so much time debating pool fees. Electricity usually has a much bigger impact on profitability, yet pool selection still gets a lot of attention.
