3 ms·
Bitcoin mining could use any amount of electricity given that the block difficulty adjusts to the prevailing hashrate. If more people pile in to mining then th
by alexkus 13y ago
Bitcoin mining could use any amount of electricity given that the block difficulty adjusts to the prevailing hashrate.
If more people pile in to mining then the difficulty increases and total $$$ spent on electricity will increase. Conversely if mining hashrate declines then difficulty is decreased to compensate.
I'm not sure how the difficulty adjustment would cope with a severe and abrupt change in mining hashrate (take it to the extreme and imagine the hashrate drops to 1/1000th of what it is now, there are going to be a lot of unconfirmed transactions out there).
- DanBC 13y agoIs more or less electricity being used now that the serious mining is done by ASICs / fpgas and not GPU clusters?
- alexkus 13y agoInteresting question. For the same hashrate then less electricity is going to be used given that ASIC mining is far more efficient that GPU mining. But the overall hashrate is still on an ever upward trend. I guess it depends on how many people have quit CPU and GPU mining altogether, or whether there are still lots of forgotten machines still burning away contributing very little (in comparison).