3 ms·
Do you have some back of the napkin counter calculations? Or critiques of their methodology?
by Kinnard 7y ago
Do you have some back of the napkin counter calculations? Or critiques of their methodology?
- VRay 7y agoI'm not sure if the article is right or wrong, but the commenter above you was probably getting at this: You can see how much money a block miner receives for a block of transactions, and given the money they received, and an estimate for the cost of power, you can estimate how much power they might have been willing to expend on it Going off the guy's link, I guess it's 24 cents to get into the next block, and a block has about 500,000 transactions, so whoever mines that block gets $125,000. Assuming 4 cents per kWh, the presence of only one miner, and no other operation costs, he'd still be breaking even if he expended (1 kwH/$0.04)*$125,000 =~ 2,500 kWh per block (and by the same napkin math, that's 6 kWh per transaction) What's weird is TFA seems to be using a similar methodology (but looking at total bitcoin mining revenue instead of an individual block), and yet they came out with a number 100x as large. I'm not sure why there's such a big discrepancy.