Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: how much does it cost to "produce" 1 BTC currently? and how much power is used?
by
Sukrim
on 17/05/2011, 10:42:58 UTC
I think Sukrim meant 6 kWH/day, so it's not 6 * 24 = 144, it's 6 * 1.

that's not what he wrote, can someone confirm this?

You need ~160W (calculating with 1W per MHash/s) to mine a bitcoin in a day currently. If you let a GPU that consumes 160W/h and calculates 160 MHashes/s run for a day, in theory you have generated a BTC.

160W/h *24h = 3870W/day --> 3,87 kW/day

Also CO2 is generally (mis?)used as an "equivalent" factor for greenhouse gases. Read a bit on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co2e before you start acting as if every greenhouse gas emission is CO2...

hmmm can you give me an idea of the "power consumption of the whole bitcoin network"??
Easily, if you take my assumption of 1 MHash/s ~ 1W/h

The current network speed is about 2000 Gigahashes/s straight.
1 Gigahash/s ~ 1 kW
1 Gigahash/s for a day ~ 24 kW
2000 Gigahash/s ~ 2000 kW (or 2 MW - something that would not even remotely warrant even building a dedicated plant - for all bitcoin mining rigs worldwide!)
2000 Gigahash/s for a day ~48000kW