Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: $500,000 per Bitcoin, baby. The math behind it.
by
BurtW
on 03/08/2014, 17:47:19 UTC
It is silly to assume that by such a date we would not have much more efficient ways of powering this technology with the vast amount of money which IS being and WILL be poured into the infrastructure of maintaining this epic ecosystem.

2/10 for effort
I hope those who did the math included this:

"Combined with Moore's law, performance per watt would grow at roughly the same rate as transistor density, doubling every 1–2 years." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Other_formulations_and_similar_laws
Neither one of you saw or understood that mining efficiency does not matter when calculating the total power consumption of the Bitcoin Network.

Efficiency only affects total hash rate and difficulty, not power consumption.

It is a given that mining hardware will become more efficient for the reasons you stated.  However, more efficient mining hardware means that for a given amount of power the network will just produce a larger hash rate.  When more efficient mining hardware hits the market miners will just buy more of it until they consume the same amount of power as before the more efficent mining hardware was on the market.

The total power consumed by the network is only bounded by the amount of money available in each block to spend on power.