Bitcoin power consumption

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I have the information from a german article that the powerconsumption of Bitcoin is 16,36TWh/year. So that's the same consumption as Libanon or Kuba! 0.08% of the world power is used only for Bitcoin. All the other crypto-currencies are not in this calculation :O

"Laut Daten von digiconomist.net beträgt der geschätzte jährliche Energieverbrauch aller Bitcoin-Aktivitäten aktuell ca. 16,36 Terawattstunden (TWh). Wäre Bitcoin ein Staat, würde dieser damit Platz 76 der energieaufwändigsten Staaten der Erde einnehmen – eingerahmt zwischen dem Libanon (77) und Kuba (75). Insgesamt entfallen etwa 0,08 % des weltweiten Energieverbrauchs auf Bitcoin-Aktivitäten, Tendenz steigend."
 
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Entirely believable if you ever tried any bitcoin mining - it takes such a lot of power now, it's become more and more complex. Even the simpler mining currencies like Etherium are barely worth the processing cost.

All that [bitcoin] processing guzzles a lot of electricity: one of the latest estimates put the annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining at 23.07 terawatt hours, roughly the amount of electricity used by Ecuador each year.
 
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No, it's the mining that is the problem... To get new coins, there's a massive amount of processing to do... There's custom processing hardware for it these days, used to be done with GPUs but it got too complex.
Iceland and China are popular because of the cheap power. Some bitcoin farms are bigger than Apple datacenters....
 
That is about 15 days average consumption at my house and would cost a bit under $40US here in Detroit. While it's a lot of energy that seems like a helluva deal to trade $40 of power for a Bitcoin worth thousands. Of course there is the cost of capital equipment and the labor involved.
 
That is about 15 days average consumption at my house and would cost a bit under $40US here in Detroit. While it's a lot of energy that seems like a helluva deal to trade $40 of power for a Bitcoin worth thousands. Of course there is the cost of capital equipment and the labor involved.

You end up with a small fraction of a Bitcoin. The only way I made money on my brief adventure in mining was to buy a miner on ebay and then, after a big jump in Bitcoin value, sell the miner for twice what I paid for it.
 
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There are rentable cloud mining clusters online which will let you buy a share of a piece of processing power of a large cluster for a price which will dwarf any sort of home processing power you could possibly achieve. You pay for the upkeep of it along with tons of other chums and as a result you receive bitcoins in return. However even in this fantastically upscaled state mining bitcoin is horrendously inefficient. I've done it myself and I quit about 2 weeks in because of the lack of ROI. I didn't get anywhere near my ROI, I maybe got 2 cents out of $30 outlay. I did the math for 2 years and it no where near matched the $30 that I paid AND during this time the difficulty of mining goes up during those 2 years. So there is no way that you could possibly ever regain your investment. It is a ponzi scheme for people who cannot do basic math.

https://www.genesis-mining.com/

Needless to say I asked for a refund.

The return is so close to 1:1 or less that its best to look at it in a way of buying bitcoin by mining instead of buying it in a trade. You need tens of thousands of dollars invested to make any sort of worthwhile returns.

And yes any sort of home processing isn't worthwhile even if you have free electricity (such as a grid-tie solar power system) because you need to buy the hardware.
 
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Exactly. Even for Etherium mining you need a handful of expensive graphics cards to to the processing, you'll never get the cash back - and if you have a box full of top line radeon or nvidia cards, you'd probably be better off sticking them on ebay!
 
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No. Not exactly. There is custom hardware (ASIC) which does a much better job than GPUs. GPUs were obsoleted in 2009. Talking about mining with GPUs these days is showing a massive disregard for the facts and that is GPUs are so underpowered for mining purposes it isn't funny.

My point is even if you buy the required custom hardware (not GPUs) and ran it at home you still have to pay for the hardware and then it becomes obsolete as mining difficulty increases.

If you did have top of the line graphics cards I would suggest using them for more noble projects such as SETI@HOME.
 
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You miss the point. One of the attractions of Etherium is that it doesn't need the same massive crunching that bitcoin does, that's partly why it and some other cryptocurrencies were introduced. It works fine with GPUs... A colleague harnessed 3 top line radeon cards he happened to have (he repairs stuff) and got to $300 worth of Etherium in a month. Then he worked out the power cost of running that flat out for a month and the profit was minimal. Then the cards went back to where the came from. It was an interesting experiment...
 
Crypto currency is a good idea per se, but Bitcoin which is one out of many different types of crypto currencies is right out crap, it's intrinsic mechanism makes it horribly volatile and thus by far can't be called a currency which should be stable over a long time.
Mining crypto currency is creation of money out of thin air.
Actually the whole idea on mining and wasting massive amounts of energy is such a rotten idea, would be better to denominate the crypto currency's value in other currencies and let people exchange their currencies freely without mining, although it would require some trusted entity to supervise the whole thing how that now would be manageable in a so called of the grid society?
 
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Did I just fall into an alternative universe? :eek::eek:

Do some tests first.

#1 Did your house gate squeak for many years in the past? If yes and its not now then you are in a parallel dimension.
#2 if your house gate didn't squeak in the past but does now then you are in a parallel dimension.

Welcome to dimension C-137.

Why not it worked for confirmation in a TV Sci-Fi show.
 
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