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Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption
- jamesaguilar 14y agoI wonder what that translates to in carbon emissions. At Palo Alto energy prices, it looks like order 1 GWh/day, or about 41 MW. Edit: oops, I see that some of this is stated in the linked article. My bad. I was just working backwards from the info in the title.
- bcl 14y agoFunny that they link to butterfly Labs, who still hasn't shipped, instead of Avalon.
- LAMike 14y agoYeah they should have linked to the guys actually shipping product... Butterfly said on their FB they are shipping next week apparently. But who knows w/ them
- C1D 14y agoBFL has (edit) not been (/edit) know to ship -but I can confirm that people have gotten their orders!- becuase It's taken some time as they've had problems with getting ASIC's. They supposedly will start sending them out at mid april (15th) which is tomorrow, so I'm going to wait and see what happens. If they do ship then I'll place my order. They probably mentioned BFL because they're currently accepting orders and also have had more media attention because of the whole scam controversy.
- epylar 14y agoThey've been accepting orders for 7-8 months and almost always state they'll ship 'any day now'.
- dustcoin 14y agoThe power numbers cited by this article are very inaccurate when considering current mining hardware and software. "* Electricity consumption is estimated based on power consumption of 650 Watts per gigahash and electricity price of 15 cent per kilowatt hour. In reality some miners will be more or less efficient." Most serious miners pay less than $0.15/kWh. An Avalon ASIC does 65Gh/s on 620W (9.5 J/Gh) A BFL Single FPGA does 800Mh/s on 80W (100 J/Gh) Even a dual ATI 5970 rig will do 1300Mh/s on 600W (461 J/Gh) Currently over 1/3 of the network is ASICs (300 * 65Gh/s of Avalons + 7Th/s from ASICMINER) and another 1/3 is probably FPGAs.
- anigbrowl 14y agoAre these ASICS going to be good for anything after mining coins? I can't help thinking they're like a shovel that only works within a goldfield and has no utility (other than as a doorstop) once superseded by faster technology or obviated by the last Bitcoin being mined.
- lreeves 14y agoLiterally nothing. The point of ASICs are specialized circuits for a single task really.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoI can't believe someone junked your post. It is an answer to the question, and it is the correct answer.
- lreeves 14y agoSorry what does "junked your post" mean?
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoMy apologies, "junked" is slang for downvoting on another forum I visit.
- ngoel36 14y agoI just take my ASIC into Starbucks. Free BTC for me...
- fixxer 14y agoI keep mine at school.
- anigbrowl 14y ago...which makes a pretty case for the school to confiscate it/sue you for the BTC generated using their power.
- fixxer 14y agoAhh, that's the HN I know and love... making the trivial a "thing" ;)
- anigbrowl 14y agoIt's an economic phenomenon that I am interested by: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
- fixxer 14y agoSounded more like you were interested in slapping my wrist.
- anigbrowl 14y agoI was just surprised you'd admit it in public, and thinking about what could happen if the school found your ASIC and knew what it was. Of course, you could make a counter-argument that you were entitled to use the school's electricity in partial exchange for your tuition fees :)
- skore 14y ago
- modeless 14y agoIt's easy to calculate a number for the waste of Bitcoin, but it's not easy to calculate a number for the waste of the awful, archaic systems it could replace. Transferring money is done today with mainframes, paper forms, and middlemen galore. If Bitcoin replaced all that there's no doubt in my mind we'd all be better off.
- anigbrowl 14y agoIf you're expecting technology to just eliminate rent-seeking, you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
- codeulike 14y agoYeah, my understanding is that miners are not just mining, they're also powering the distributed transaction engine of bitcoin. Is that correct? In which case the power consumption needs to be compared to (per $ or whatever) consumption for Bacs, swift, visa etc
- jacquesm 14y agoThe proper measure would be Joules/transaction.
- sigil 14y agoCorrect. It's quite ingenious actually. "By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them." http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- codeulike 14y agoBut how does that work when the generation of new coins tails off, but the generation of new blocks does not?
- 14y ago
- kayoone 14y agoImo the Bitcoin Goldrush is long gone. In mid 2011 you could make a couple of hundred $ per month with a decent Rig that had 3 decent GPUs. Todays numbers are far from that.
- wmf 14y agoLast week mining profitability was back to 2011 levels but then somebody Goxed it up. http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts/ http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts/
- overgard 14y agoInteresting, but I'm curious, does anyone know how that compares to something like SETI, or folding at home?
- sehugg 14y agoCheck out the BOINC combined stats, which includes SETI@Home and lots of other volunteer computing projects: http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/project/detail/host http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/project/detail/host It says the network has about 9 million hosts, which at about 200 watts (ballpark, GPUs can consume a lot of power) would consume about 2 megawatts of electricity. Bitcoin consumes 892.54 MWh/day = 37 megawatts.
- jb- 14y agoSo that is about 55 million dollars a year to completely secure the network and process all transactions. I am not entirely sure how it will scale, but I predict that it will scale logarithmically with the number of transactions, especially considering that mining equipment will become more efficient. Meanwhile the United States will spend 797 million dollars [1] this year in simply printing and transporting physical currency, not including all the other obvious costs in maintaining a modern currency. [1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/foia/2013newcurrency.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/foia/2013newcurrency.htm
- tlrobinson 14y agoIn a perfect mining market the total amount of money spent by miners each day (cost of electricity/bandwidth + amortized cost of hardware) will always tend to converge on the value of the mining rewards (minus some profit margin), which for the next 4 years is about 3600 BTC per day (25 BTC/block * 6 blocks/hour * 24 hours/day). If the value of Bitcoins go up, so does the number of miners securing the network, which makes sense. It's pretty ingenious.