03 Dec 2013 / Forbes – Via Marginal Revolution we find the page of Bitcoin statistics. And there we are told that mining bitcoins currently consumes some $15 million’s worth of electricity each day. Which is, when you come to think about it, really a rather astonishing amount.
One way of thinking about this is that the electricity used in a year is equal to 50% of the total outstanding value of all bitcoins so far mined. That’s not something that I can imagine being all that sustainable as a long term proposition really.
However, there’s one little detail that makes me think that this might not be quite true. And it’s here, in the details of how they have calculated that electricity requirement:
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.
With the older types of mining that might be a fair enough number, when people were using just straight PC chips or perhaps the FPUs in graphics cards. But the state of the art these days is a custom designed ASIC and those just aren’t going to have anything like that sort of power consumption:….. Read more
