Quote from: philipma1957 on July 29, 2024, 08:46:17 PM

Well it is not as much power as you think.

800eh at 20watts is 16000megawatts the whole world wide power use for btc.

so Texas burns 80000 megawatts an hour for every ones uses.

this means Texas alone could run 5x the gear that the world uses.

we can grow the network to 1000eh or 1zh by years end easy peasy

I don't think it's that simple, those 80,000MW were not built over a year or two, it takes a lot of time and money to build them, in this article they talk about a 10GW power plants for $18 billion which means a single 1000MW plant would cost $1.8 billion dollar, that's hardly enough for 50EH.

Another issue that is even more complicated and probably more expensive than production is distribution, that 80,000MW is distributed all across the state, an area of nearly 700,000 KM2, so even if every other business and household shut down to allow BTC mining, it isn't going to be as easy as bringing 80,000MW worth of gears to Texas, you are going to have to distribute them evenly across that area which isn't going to be possible.

Also, when they build power plants, it's usually done on demand, what electric company is going to invest dozen billions to build power plants and infrastructure for a risky business like BTC? half the demand can disappear overnight if the price of BTC crashes, the way I see it is that most miners in the U.S. run on excessive power that is otherwise going to waste, unlike the automotive or defense business, investing in mining is very risky.

Another major factor to consider is the supply of natural gas or whatever given power plant needs to operate, so it's not like you can build an unlimited number of power plants, there is a whole infrastructure related to it, you build a power plant in the middle of nowhere, no access to gas or to expense to transport coal or liquid gas, you build it in an already populated area, the supply pipes are hardly enough for the existing power plants.

I can write ten pages on how expensive and difficult it is to generate electricity, obviously, the entire power used by miners is nothing compared to what the world uses, which still means you are correct in thinking that in power-terms, we still have a lot of room for growth, it's possible, it just can't happen too fast due to all the difficulties in generating power plus miners themselves.

Anyway, reading about Bitfufu aka Bitmain expansion of hashrate to nearly 30EH, it seems Bitmain is planning to go back to being a mining superpower and not just a major seller of hashrate, it would be very difficult for those large miners to compete against Bitmain especially now that Bitmain also operates mainly in the U.S.