Originally Posted by Astro14
Originally Posted by Shannow
Originally Posted by Astro14
$2,000 in electricity to make a single bit coin.
Wow.
Here, wholesale before transmission is $85 (Oz) per MWh, so if they were hard wired to a power station, that's $6k Oz, $4,300 US.
Assuming that the quoted power is scalable, and at Oz retail rates, that's $19,400 Oz, or $13,800 US.
Even more stunning! I knew that the quoted consumption cost in the article was predicated on cheap hydro power in that valley...but..who would mine Bitcoin at this cost?
Let's see, I'll spend $13,800 (plus the cost of my server farm) to create something that I can sell at a market price of, $6,600...
Scarier even than that...per the article
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"They could have gone anywhere in the world and they chose Medicine Hat," said Clugston. "[Hut 8] is not here for renewable energy because it is not reliable. They need gas-fired generation and we have it in spades."
I can handle that if you build a gas plant (not the open cycle part), and run it constantly, you get an early return on investment (and GTs, low life consumption, as life is 1:1 in those regimes)...it pays the installation off.
Quote
The bitcoin system is designed, so only a limited number of the cryptocurrency can be mined everyday. Over time, as more miners compete for a decreasing number of available bitcoins, facilities will have to use more electricity compared to the amount of the cryptocurrency they collect.
So it's self limiting, per the $ that you have suggested...any home bitcoiner miners in Oz are seriously mathematically challenged...and eventually it won't be worth mining.
But the numbers are astonishing...I did a thread some months ago where bitcoin uses more energy than New Zealand...that's utterly insane...
Per the quoted company
https://hut8mining.com/
They proudly display that at the current time they are using 87MW...mining furiously...That's 7% of Tasmania's current demand...for 20 bitcoins a day.
It's not even solving SETI, curing cancer, just proving that the right number of hashes have been crossed to demonstrate the effort of "mining"...it's a disastrous model