It may seem that investing in a mining farm is limited only to expensive equipment. However, it is not! You should also take into account the cost of electricity, which will be colossal. In addition to the fact that energy is consumed by numerous adapters and video cards, the consumption is also spent on cooling the room where all this is installed. Mining is a very energy-intensive business.
Below is a detailed discussion of how much electricity a mining farm consumes and how this affects the miner's income.
The essence of mining
First you need to figure out what mining is all about. From English, the word mining is translated as "mining".
Today, many Internet miners are engaged in the extraction of electronic currency (for example, bitcoin). They use specific programs and powerful computers.
In the process of performing various computer tasks on a computer, online users mine bitcoins or other electronic currencies.
During the mining of electronic currencies, the processor is very heavily loaded, which leads to a large expenditure of electrical energy and an intense release of a huge amount of heat.
Electricity, in addition to investing in expensive equipment, is considered the main resource that is needed to get cryptocurrencies at home.
Therefore, before you start mining electronic currency, you need to determine how much electricity the cryptocurrency farm uses.
How much electricity in kW does a mining farm consume?
For example, a cryptocurrency farm runs on 6 video cards. Such a farm consumes 500 W, and the price for 1 kW * h is on average 4 rubles.
With a bitcoin price of $ 11,300 at the moment, the mining farm gives 63 BTC per hour, which is about 1,429 rubles in 24 hours.
When calculating electrical consumption of 2.5 kW, we subtract 240 rubles. for electrical energy per day. As a result, the miner's profit for 1 day is 1189 rubles. The monthly profit of such a miner is 35,670 rubles.
But it should be remembered that the supply of electricity to the house can be stopped at any time, and the computer can break down. Also, the processes of mining tokens are regularly complicated, and as a result, mining becomes slower and more expensive.
How much electrical energy does one miner consume?
For example, you can consider the work of the Antminer T9 miner. This is one of the well-known Internet users on the World Wide Web. I use this player to mine Bitcoin. With this mining, the online user consumes 1690 watts of energy. Thus, in 1 day, he spends 40.56 kWh.
With an average price of electricity of 4 rubles. per kW * h, the miner spends 141 rubles per day, which is 4259 rubles per month, and 51815 rubles per year.
With the current complexity of cryptocurrency mining, the Antminer T9 user receives 0.0023 BTC per hour, which at the current exchange rate is $ 25.99 or 1463 rubles. As a result, the monthly income is approximately 43,800 rubles.
How much does a mining farm consume per month in different countries?
The developer of various online projects, the German scientist M. Strube calculated the energy consumption of the entire global mining network. He found that mining equipment consumes 1.17 terawatt hours of electricity per month. So, Slovenia consumes 1.08 terawatt-hours of electricity per month.
When mining electronic currencies, such an amount of electricity is generated, which is equal to the volume of 7.6 million tons of harmful substances with carbon dioxide emitted into the Earth's atmosphere. According to the calculations of this scientist, the same amount of gas from the exhaust from the rear pipe is formed by an ordinary car after traveling 43,000,000,000 km.
Strube calculated that, for example, in Germany mining tokens is not a cost-effective business, because electricity is very expensive in a country like this. There, 1 kWh costs 29 Euro cents (20.2 rubles). If all mining equipment were located in Germany, then 4,220,000,000 euros would have to be paid for electricity per year.
Today, about 657 thousand new electronic bitcoins are mined a year, so such a business in Germany would end up not profitable, but unprofitable.
Due to the high price of electricity in Europe, cryptocurrency farms are more often set up in exotic cold or warm countries. So, in Iceland kWh costs 10 cents Euro (6.9 rubles). It's always cold in this country, so you don't have to spend a lot of money on air conditioners.
Another optimal country for placing a mining enterprise is considered Venezuela... In this warm southern state, electricity is even cheaper than in northern cold Iceland. As a result, Venezuelans are actively buying video cards and receive from $ 3,000 a month in token mining.
However, today players such as the Chinese completely control the mining market. IN China 6 large world cryptocurrency pools have been created and more than 50% of the world's bitcoins are mined in this state.
- every day, users use the same amount of electricity for mining bitcoins as 520,000 residents of Canada;
- when mining bitcoins, they spend the same amount of electrical energy as all residents of the Republic of Congo;
- when mining bitcoins, miners consume more electricity than any state from 166 world countries;
- the electricity they spend on bitcoin is enough for a long voyage of 6 Nimitz warships.
- the electricity that bitcoin miners consume in a year is enough to supply electricity to all US homes for only 19 hours;
- when mining bitcoins, only 20% of electricity is consumed from 1 coal-fired power plant in Taiwan;
- the Three Gorges hydroelectric plant in China generates 3 times more electricity than all bitcoin consumes;
- one thermal power plant in the USA generates more electricity than a miner spends on mining bitcoins;
- 17 large data centers of the US NSA use more electricity than bitcoin.
- it should also be noted that in 2015 Google consumed 2 times more electricity than it currently uses bitcoin.
What are the future prospects for electronic currencies
Bitcoin today runs on very cheap electrical energy. Users, competing with each other, are fighting for low electrical consumption. As a result, any online user who consumes more than average electricity closes their own cryptocurrency farm due to non-profitability.
As a result, cryptocurrency farms are installed where there is a large amount of electricity, where it cannot be stored in anything or export it.
Gas, oil products and coal are easily exported, so users do not install mining servers where they are the main source of electrical energy.
As a result, it is more profitable to sell such resources to where they are bought for a high price.
In countries where there is practically no export of oil and gas (in particular, in countries that do not have access to the ocean or sea), bitcoin is also obtained on electricity. But most online users take their electricity from hydroelectric power plants, geysers and thermal springs that cannot be transported or left in some kind of warehouse.
Miners will continue to work in places with cheap electricity.
Today, mining tokens in a city or in a large regional center is not considered a profitable business. As a result, the consumer spends more electricity on the operation of the air conditioner or heating the water than the miner can do.
Forecast for the future
For several years now, users-miners of electronic currencies have faced an acute issue of the consumption of electrical energy.
Indeed, for the stable operation of a mining network, large capacities are needed, developers of computer equipment regularly increase the number of special boards for the extraction of electronic currencies (in particular, bitcoins), and all of them are very energy-intensive.
An environmentalist from Leiden Dutch University S. Dietman made the following conclusion: by 2020, the mining of bitcoin tokens or other currencies will require as much electricity as, for example, Denmark will consume over this entire period.
This scientist tried to calculate how much electricity will be spent on mining Bitcoin tokens by 2020.
Over the past 7 years, the mining ecological system has grown a lot. Special equipment for mining electronic currencies has become much more modern and efficient. At the same time, along with this, the consumption of electricity has increased significantly.
This is a normal situation because the amount of electrical energy consumed is directly related to the power of the computer equipment.
Today, mining electronic currencies has begun to consume so much electricity that in most countries, mining coins at home has become virtually impossible due to the constantly growing electricity costs.
As a result, many miners are afraid that the production of tokens will soon stop forever.
In his own article, the ecologist cited two forecasts for electricity consumption - positive and negative. Considering the fact that the technology of mining tokens is becoming cheaper in terms of energy consumption, equipment for mining coins is rapidly improving, and devices that consume a lot of energy are slowly being squeezed out of the market.
As a result, the global growth in token mining will slow down in the future. In fact, such a scenario will lead to a slowdown in the growth of global energy consumption.
However, the most likely is second negative outlook to reduce the efficiency of the extraction of electronic currencies. Due to the upcoming decrease in the future block reward, the total energy consumption in the Bitcoin network will actually reach the same level of electrical consumption as in the whole state - Denmark.
In other words, the power consumption when mining tokens will only increase, even with a positive development of events.
Leonard Wiz is a mentor at a Hong Kong-based accelerator business specializing in blockchain startups.
To bookmarks
Bitcoin is one of the most discussed topics now: how much has it grown in the morning, how much the user would receive if he bought a cryptocurrency in 2011, and so on.
There is an area that is not often talked about when discussing cryptocurrency - the environmental friendliness of the production of cryptocurrency itself - mining. How much electricity do miners consume and will they lead the planet to disaster in the pursuit of the unrestrained growth of bitcoin?
Leonard Wiz carefully examines how much miners still wind up on a planetary electric meter.
Bitcoin mining should be banned: due to carbon dioxide emissions, mining will destroy the environment to hell.
Charlie Strauss
English science fiction writer
Open pit mining
How much electricity does Bitcoin consume?
Since mining is not regulated by the state, and in some countries it is even prohibited, it is difficult to find accurate data on how much electricity is spent on it. Even where mining is permitted by law, electricity producers do not always know what their resources are used for: mining is not separately taken into account in their statistics.
We can estimate energy consumption based on the complexity of bitcoin. Complexity is a value computed by the protocol and attached to each block.
Difficulty measures the average number of hashes that the miner left to find one valid block. This value is recalculated every 2016 blocks (about two weeks) to maintain a block interval of about ten minutes.
Since December 7th (block 498048), the difficulty value is 1,590,896,927,258. Each hash is a random number between 1 and 2 ^ 256-1.
Complexity is a target value that no hash must exceed. The process can be compared to playing darts. Complexity is the center of the target. The smaller the central sector on the target, the more darts you need to throw in order to accidentally hit it.
To calculate the average number of hashes it will take to find a block for ten minutes, use the formula D * 232/600. Here you can see how this formula was extracted. For the current difficulty, this is 1.14x10 ^ 19 hashes per second or 14 Exsahs / s.
Bitmain is a Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer based in Beijing and Shenzhen. This company produces about 70% of the world's bitcoin miners based on Taiwanese TSCM microchips.
Bitmain's latest miner, the S9, uses 19nm microchips. Their performance is 4 TX / s (14x10 ^ 12) with a power consumption of 1372 W. The earlier S9 models have similar specifications.
Today it is the most energy-efficient miner on the market, with which you can define the lower threshold for energy consumption.
By dividing 1.14x10 ^ 19 by 14x10 ^ 12, we find that a maximum of 800,000 S9 miners are currently in the works, consuming about 1,100 MW in total.
In light of all that has been said, does Bitcoin look like such a big burden on the neck of the global energy sector? Given the trend of Bitcoin mining towards renewable resources and the fact that the traditional banking system is far from sustainable, it is possible that cryptocurrency has a positive impact on the environment.
Material supplemented by editors
Write a message) is an extremely energy-consuming activity, because the essence of mining is to calculate hash functions. Such calculations put a heavy load on the processors, which is accompanied by high consumption of electricity and powerful heat generation. The cost of electricity and cooling of farms must be taken into account when calculating the investment.
To understand how much electricity a mining farm consumes, you can take the average power consumption of the equipment and adjust for the efficiency of the power supplies. Such an amendment is often forgotten, but the power supply never works with an efficiency of 100%, it loses part of its energy in the form of heat. Therefore, it is better to buy high quality PSUs like APW3 ++, the efficiency of which reaches 93%.
Approximate calculations
A single miner like Antminer T9 consumes up to 1690 W of energy, taking into account the efficiency of the power supply. The day of his work will result in 40.56 kWh. With the electricity price of 3.5 rubles per kilowatt-hour, the costs will be 141 rubles 96 kopecks per day, 4259 rubles per month or 51,815 rubles per year. Using ten miners, the annual electricity costs will exceed half a million rubles.
What's on a large scale?
Industrial mining does not cost ten or even hundreds of ASIC modules; here the bill goes to thousands and tens of thousands of devices. For example, the largest mining farm in Russia has about 3 thousand, produces 38 petaheshes per second, and consumes more than 3 GW of electricity per month. The standard monthly electricity bill is 6.5 million rubles.
Such mining energy costs are far from the limit. The largest farms in China spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, as do farms in the United States. However, even such costs are not comparable to the profits of these mining farms.
How to save on electricity for a mining farm?
As of 2017, mining Bitcoin, as the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, at home does not bring the expected results. Dozens, hundreds of specialized miners are needed to gain profit. Of course, using such equipment at home or in a garage is very problematic for a number of reasons. Therefore, now and in the future, the most reasonable solution is to buy equipment and place it in large mining farms. This not only gives you tremendous performance, but it also takes the worry out of floor space, power and cooling.
If you live in a region where the electricity costs of a mining farm are very high, you should pay attention to the Farm Service for placing equipment for mining cryptocurrencies in the region with the lowest electricity price. As of 2017, such a region is still the Irkutsk region, where the cost of 1 kWh is slightly more than 1 ruble. Taking into account the complication of the mining process every year, the income received from a small number of miners will decrease, and the cost of electricity in your region can only grow. To get more profit in the mining process, it makes sense to save on electricity!
https: //www.site/2017-08-28/kalkulyator_na_sverdlovskom_elektrichestve_mozhno_namaynit_34_mlrd_rubley_za_mesyac
34 billion rubles a month
How much can one Russian region earn from mining?
Jens Kalaene / dpa-Zentralbild / Global Look Press
Russian miners (people who "mine" cryptocurrencies using powerful computers) are interested in the surplus of electricity generated by power plants. According to Vedomosti, Eurosibenergo (part of Oleg Deripaska's En +), which offered commercial companies inexpensive energy and ready-made infrastructure due to excess capacity, was surprised by the number of requests from owners of cryptocurrency farms. Electricity is the main resource required for mining cryptocurrencies: powerful video cards and other equipment that calculates the hash (cryptocurrency formula) consumes a large amount of energy.
The Sverdlovsk region has always been proud of the fact that it produces more electricity than it consumes. But what if you use free power for mining? the site decided to calculate how many "farms" for mining can be built on the difference between the production and consumption of electricity in the region.
Disclaimer: all our calculations are exclusively hypothetical and are intended to visually show how much mining costs, what power it consumes and how much money in theory it can bring. In fact, the electricity distribution scheme is much more complicated. For example, electricity generated at several CHPPs of T Plus goes to the federal Wholesale Electricity and Power Market, which distributes energy between regions. They do not sell energy to companies on their own.
For electricity calculations, we used the data of the system operator of the unified energy system of the branch of SO UES JSC of the Urals ODU for July 2017. According to the department, in July the power plants of the Sverdlovsk region produced 4,646.7 million kWh of energy. Consumption in July amounted to 3214.6 million kWh. It turns out that the Sverdlovsk stations worked out at 1.4 billion kWhmore electricity than the residents of Sverdlovsk used.
As one of the miners told the site, one good "farm" for mining "ether" (a cheaper cryptocurrency that requires less power) consumes about 1 kWh per hour, that is, 24 kWh per day.
Thus, about 1.9 million "farms" can operate at 1.4 billion kWh per month.One "farm", according to the site, now brings about 600 rubles a day, that is, 18 thousand rubles a month. That is, 1.9 million "farms" will earn 34.2 billion rubles per month and 410.4 billion rubles per year. For comparison, the budget revenues of the Sverdlovsk region in 2017 according to the plan should amount to 188.4 billion rubles.
True, the construction of such a number of "farms" requires large investments.
Equipment for one "farm" that consumes 1 kW / h of energy will cost 130 thousand rubles: for this money you need to buy 6 video cards for 20 thousand rubles, a motherboard for 10 thousand rubles, a processor and a power supply. One farm consumes 720 kWh per month. The cost of electricity for one "farm" at REC tariffs for companies will cost 7200 rubles (therefore, mining in residential buildings, where electricity is cheaper, as well as the theft of resources, is so popular among novice "miners").
It is much more profitable to mine on an industrial scale. A plant of 100 "farms" is called optimal. The equipment for it will cost 13 million rubles. They will use 72 MW per month - electricity tariffs for such volumes are reduced to 5-6 rubles and will amount to 360 thousand rubles. Such a plant will generate 1.8 million rubles a month (1.4 million rubles, taking into account the cost of electricity). The equipment will pay off in 9.3 months, then the plant will start making a profit.
After that, the monthly profit, taking into account all expenses, will be one million rubles or more.Equipment for 1.9 million "farms" (or 19 thousand factories) will cost 247 billion rubles. Taking into account the cost of electricity, they can bring 26.6 billion rubles per month. They will also pay off in 9.3 months and then will be able to bring 34.2 billion rubles a month.
Let us recall that our calculations are exclusively hypothetical. Firstly, all the electricity we calculated is not ownerless, most of it goes to other regions. Secondly, 1.9 million “farms” are a lot (the largest pool of miners has only 191.7 thousand “farms”). Finding enough equipment to build so many farms is unlikely to be possible.