Quote from: inca on October 04, 2014, 06:30:10 PM

Quote from: An amorous cow-herder on October 04, 2014, 06:10:24 PM

Quote from: sgbett on October 04, 2014, 04:36:16 PM

Why goat my dear fellow, it's wild speculation, implication is in the eye of the beholder.

Well, the chart does imply a couple of things, amoth others the following.
The mining network will consume more power than a medium sized country.
The technology will still not be widely used, even at those price levels, otherwise it would have stabilzed with a high volume.
So, thats what you believe?

Why on earth does the mining have to use more power than a medium size country as the price rises?

Quote from: farfiman on September 30, 2014, 06:33:55 AM

According to this post by BurtW it is illogical to get to those prices in this "era" unless electricity becomes mega abundant or mining much more efficient.

Quote from: BurtW on August 24, 2014, 12:58:53 PM

A price of $252,000 in era 0 (50 BTC/block) would have caused the Bitcoin network to attempt to consume about 30% of all the electrical power produced on the planet.

A price of $252,000 in this era, era 1 (25 BTC/block) would cause the Bitcoin network to attempt to consume about 15% of all the electrical power produced on the planet.

So, in order to keep the Bitcoin network from attempting to consume more than 1% of all the power produced we should all hope that the price does not reach that level until at least era 5 - about 2029 or so.

Of course all of these numbers are rough "back of the envelope" estimates:

Code:

Original target Subsidy Est Fees Power % of total world
Era starting year BTC/block BTC/hour GW power production
--- --------------- ----------- ---------- ------ ----------------
0 2009 50.00000000 0.00000000 680.40 29.44%
1 2013 25.00000000 0.00000000 340.20 14.72%
2 2017 12.50000000 0.00000000 170.10 7.36%
3 2021 6.25000000 0.00000000 85.05 3.68%
4 2025 3.12500000 0.00000000 42.53 1.84%
5 2029 1.56250000 0.00000000 21.26 0.92%
6 2033 0.78125000 1.31250000 13.61 0.59%
7 2037 0.39062500 3.65625000 13.61 0.59%
8 2041 0.19531250 4.82812500 13.61 0.59%
9 2045 0.09765625 5.41406250 13.61 0.59%