Bit Coin's electricity bill

[bernardgreen]

Extracts from

http://www.epdtonthenet.net/article...e-world-s-electric-energy-by-end-of-2018.aspx


""His estimates, based in economics, put the minimum current usage of the Bitcoin network at 2.55 gigawatts, which means it uses almost as much electricity as Ireland.""

""But if you want to get a bigger slice of the pie, you need to increase your computing power. So there's a big incentive for people to increase how much they're spending on electricity and on machines," de Vries says.""

Joule, de Vries: "Bitcoin's Growing Energy Problem" http://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6

 

[motorbiking]

Unless you have solar power and a decent GPU device, I can't see a small timer making any money. Even with cheap power and decent GPU you are looking at a 2 year payback. Once people realise this and see how easy it is to nick their fees, it will disappear. There is however a massive load of bots hunting the internet for easy to hijack cloud services to standup crypto mining setups. Even if they can run for a few days its free money.

 

[JohnD]

there's a big incentive for people to increase how much they're spending on electricity and on machines

The incentive is to use electricity, not to spend money. It does not create an asset that is in any way "useful"

China has a vast amount of electricity wasted on these mining farms, the pricing policy is very odd. They also produce vast amounts of pollution from their dirty coal furnaces.

Unintended consequences of cheap power?

 

[SirGalahad]

Unless you have solar power and a decent GPU device, I can't see a small timer making any money. Even with cheap power and decent GPU you are looking at a 2 year payback. Once people realise this and see how easy it is to nick their fees, it will disappear. There is however a massive load of bots hunting the internet for easy to hijack cloud services to standup crypto mining setups. Even if they can run for a few days its free money.

Or they change their consensus algorithm - problem solved!

 

[Judy in the sky]

Surely someone is paying for the electricity used though ? Not like these crypto miners are not paying their electricity bills