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The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. This is roughly equivalent to the energy con
by jjk166 6y ago
The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. This is roughly equivalent to the energy content of 100 gallons of gasoline. Assuming electricity is produced at the local power plant from fossil fuels at 40% overall efficiency, that electric vehicles have a powerplant to road efficiency of 30% while internal combustion car averages 20 mpg, if you drive for 100,000 miles over the course of a car's lifetime, you will save the equivalent of 8,750 gallons of gasoline. Paying for your tesla with bitcoin will decrease those lifetime carbon savings by 2.8%.
If for every 35 people who pay for their tesla in bitcoin, 1 is someone who wouldn't have bought an electric vehicle otherwise, there is still a net overall decrease in CO2 emissions.
- frongpik 6y agoI'd assume those 308 kWh come from a hydro station nearby and drop the loosy calculations about teslas and gallons.
- jjk166 6y agoMy analysis is a worst case scenario, if you use green energy sources it only gets better.
- craftinator 6y ago> The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. Source?
- jjk166 6y agoA current ASIC bitcoin miner will do 90 Terahashes per second (1 Terahash = 1 trillion hashes) while consuming 3420 Watts which is equivalent to 38 Watts per Terahash (38 W/TH). Average power consumption will be higher, though those with big dedicated rigs probably make up the bulk of the network's processing power. The entire bitcoin mining network which processes all transactions does 120 Exahashes (120,000,000 terahashes) per second. Were all mining done on comparable asics this would be 4.56 GW to run the whole network, which in turn means electricity consumption would be 4.56 million kwh per hour. At the time of this writing bitcoin is averaging 14,814 transactions per hour, meaning the average electricity consumption per transaction is 308 kwh. You can see the hash rates and power consumption for bitcoin miners at [0]. Hash rates for the network at [1]. Transaction rate at [2]. [0] https://www.asicminervalue.com/efficiency/sha-256 https://www.asicminervalue.com/efficiency/sha-256 [1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate [2] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second
- craftinator 6y agoThank you for showing source and calculations! I hate all the magic numbers being thrown around.