Quote from: Syke on August 28, 2013, 06:08:27 PM

Quote from: crazy_rabbit on August 28, 2013, 09:10:36 AM

Thats only for hobby miners who don't care about their electricity bill or don't pay it. If you're working seriously in mining, you have to factor in power costs. It's not 'almost nothing'.

Someday that will be a factor, but not for a while.

Let's look at the power hungry Avalon.

80 GH/s, 65M difficulty = $74/day income
700 watts, $.15/kwh = $2.5/day expense

Electricity costs 3% of the income. That's pretty low.

Or how about the Bitfury that is now shipping.

360 GH/s, 65M difficulty = $330/day income
250 watts, $.15/kwh = $1/day expense

Bitfury has 10 times the efficiency of the Avalon. .3% of the income goes to electricity. That really is 'almost nothing'.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "a while". In the next 3 months your right power is a non-issue. That is why ASICMiner/Avalon route was the superior one. They beat BFL to market despite BFL soaking up massive amounts of cash obtained under false pretenses.

Still the hashrate is relatively low and will continue to grow rapidly in the near term. 5,000 TH/s by December isn't impossible. At that point using your numbers the Avalon and Bitfury are spending 30% and 3% respectively on power. For the same amount of hashpower the Bitfury is making 32% more net revenue.

As an extreme example at 6 PH/s (not unreasonable by very early 2014) a user in a high power area (say 30 cent per kWh) would need to spend >100% of gross revenue on power unless the exchange rate rises. Now you may say nobody spending 30 cents per kWh should be mining and I agree but many people assumed these are ASICs, power won't matter.

So it all depends on how fast the network hashrate will grow. However I agree for 2013 power isn't really that big of an issue even under the worst case scenario, but 2014 is a whole different story. The nominal numbers don't really matter. Power was important for GPUs and in time the ASIC powered network will use just as much power as the GPU powered one did (normalized for exchange rate). There is one critical difference though the difference in efficiency between the best and worst GPU rigs (excluding NVidia) is maybe 3x. Right now among ASIC devices in the field it is already 8x and if Cointerra meets their estimate it will be more like 12x once they ship. Normalized for process size Bitfury is the most efficient design, so if a Fury-28* shows linear improvement to efficiency it would be closer to 20x. That is huge and because of that I would say power efficiency is MORE important for ASICs.

Electrical break even difficulty by device efficiency: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281279

* Fury-28 pretty catchy huh? If you like that name guys I wouldn't mind some chips as a gift.