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Question: At current electricity prices, what is the total cost of mining the complete 21 million bitcoins set?

• tantalor 14y ago
  In other words, what is the expected cost for the electricity to mine one Bitcoin?
  • gibybo 14y ago
    In the average, general case, it is slightly less than the cost of one Bitcoin. Due to the recent volatility it has been a lot less, probably about half at the moment (expect this to increase though).
    • tantalor 14y ago
      That's good evidence of a bubble.
      • gibybo 14y ago
        No, it is good evidence that the price is volatile. The cost to mine follows the price of a Bitcoin with a built in 2 week delay. It's just how it was designed.
• gibybo 14y ago
  This depends on a lot of factors that change rapidly and are hard to predict. Essentially it will take until 2130 to mine all Bitcoins, regardless of how much electricity/computational power is thrown at it (there are some technical exceptions to this, but they are unlikely). Current mining is probably using on the order of ~30-50 MW. At 10 cents kw/h (low estimate), that's ~$100k/day. It also grows with the price of Bitcoin, so it has been growing rapidly recently.
• mikeash 14y ago
  The difficulty of mining is dynamically adjusted based on the currently available mining capacity so that bitcoins are produced at a constant rate over time no matter what. In other words, you could mine the full set of bitcoins for virtually no electricity whatsoever if you could convince the world to abandon bitcoin mining completely, then just let a single old, slow, cheap miner run in the corner for the next 100+ years. Or you could use as much electricity as you wanted on the project by throwing more and more computational resources at it.
  • mkr-hn 14y ago
    So if someone set off a series of EMPs across the planet leaving only a handful of computers functional, the difficulty would adjust downward to account for it?
    • mikeash 14y ago
      Precisely.
    • TrevorJ 14y ago
      Or convince everyone that it isn't profitable for the amount of electricity involved.
      • jes5199 14y ago
        Sometimes electricity is essentially free. My home is heated by electricity (I live in California) - any watts that I spend mining bitcoins produces the same amount of heat as my electric heater, but has the advantageous side-effect of maybe making money. (I don't actually do this because I don't have a desktop computer, and it's unclear if building one at this point will pay for itself before custom integrated circuits push the bitcoin difficulty so high that GPUs become worthless)
        • shpxnvz 14y ago
          Does your home have a heat pump? If so, your house heat pump is 3 to 4 times more efficient than the waste heat produced by your computer, and you are using 3 to 4 times more electricity compared to the same heat output from a heat pump.
• tlrobinson 14y ago
  In a perfectly efficient mining market the cost of mining is exactly the number of Bitcoins mined, minus some small profit margin. All profitable miners would be using the most efficient hardware, in a location where electricity is cheapest.