5 ms·
The power numbers cited by this article are very inaccurate when considering current mining hardware and software. "* Electricity consumption is estimated base
by dustcoin 14y ago
The 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thinking they're like a shovel that only works within a goldfield and has no utility (other than as a doorstop) once superseded by faster technology or obviated by the last Bitcoin being mined.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.
- Drakim 14y agoEven after the last bitcoin is mined you can still mine for transaction fees.
- SilasX 14y agoSince they're optimized to compute SHA256 hashes, then yes: any application requiring such a computation.
- ef4 14y agoAfter the last Bitcoin is mined (and actually much sooner than that), the profit from mining will have shifted away from new coins and into transaction fees. Mining new coins and processing transactions are the same thing. So the hardware can remain useful as long as Bitcoin stays in use. (Could it get obsoleted by better hardware? Of course, but that's true of every piece of electronics.)
- anigbrowl 14y agoI guess what I am confused by is that the transaction processing is much easier than mining (ie it's not going to get more and more difficult to do do over time) so you'd need to be processing a very large number of transactions before you'd need an ASIC. If you're a bank or BTC exchange then it's a no-brainer, but I wonder if more than a small number of these devices will be able to do enough work to justify their power consumption as time goes by.
- lenazegher 14y ago>I guess what I am confused by is that the transaction processing is much easier than mining (ie it's not going to get more and more difficult to do do over time) Are you sure this is true? My understanding is that the proof-of-work requirements will be the same even after no new coins can be mined. Otherwise, the integrity of bitcoin would be threatened.
- maxerickson 14y agoBy easier, do you mean less competitive? The transaction fees are won in the same fashion as the mining rewards, so given a high enough level of paying users there should be incentive to run nodes (the transaction fees might even overtake the mining rewards before the last new coins are awarded, if things play out in a bitcoin friendly manner).
- anigbrowl 14y agoBut if you are mining, there are fewer and fewer new coins to be discovered over time, so you have to compute more and more hashes in hopes of finding a new one. My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that processing a transaction 1 year from now will be no more difficult than processing one today, whereas in the future you'll have to mine for longer to have the same chance of getting a BTC. In other words, doesn't the workload for processing each transaction stay the same over time?
- mtgx 14y agoFrom the moment I saw this I immediately thought it's probably wrong, because they think the biggest volume of mining is done with PC's, when in fact it's with ASIC's and FPGA's now, which are far more efficient than PC's.
- Retric 14y agoThe problem is people also mine on dual core CPU's. When looking for total energy consumption you need to include the long tail of horrible hardware because of botnet's / school computers where the miner does not directly pay for energy costs and so does not care about efficiency. PS: Consider a ten hour 600 mile trip by a 60mpg car and a 6mpg camper. The average fuel consumption is not (60mpg + 6mpg) / 2 = 33mpg, but (2*600miles)/(600miles/60mpg + 600miles/6mpg) or 10.9mpg.
- nwh 14y agoNobody mines on a CPU anymore, there's absolutely no point. At the current difficulty, you would barely even get a single share. For example, a single share on p2pool is at difficulty 725 now, there's no way a CPU miner can solve that.
- thatthatis 14y agoBotnets. School computer labs. Kids in their parent's basement. No rational person who bears the full cost of their actions would mine on a CPU anymore. But 1) not everyone is rational and moreover 2) not everyone bears the full cost of their actions.
- rb2k_ 14y ago> The problem is people also mine on dual core CPUs That would only be botnets though? You'd probably make more money walking around outside and and hoping to find quarters
- archangel_one 14y agoYes, but the person running the botnet is not paying for it, so they don't care about efficiency.
- hippich 14y agobut person running botnet always have a choose what to do with it. and mining bitcoins with cpu would be last thing he would do I guess..
- hollerith 14y ago>An Avalon ASIC does 65Gh/s on 620W Wow! That's less than 1.5 percent of the (average) cost estimated by the OP.