No it doesn’t, assuming the mining tech improves via FPGA and ASIC, leading to more hashes per KWh. It’s very hard to predict the future ratio between hash rates and mining rewards.
This is true, but the reward is currently far larger than the electrical consumption, so mining is currently mostly a contest to bring more hardware online.
(kicking CPUs and GPUs out of the contest probably did a lot to lower power consumption, but I wonder if the growth of the network has overshadowed that)
Not true at all. If enough hardware is available, pool only expands until reward covers electricity cost plus small margin. I.e. bitcoin mining electricity-cost bound for the long time now.
That would depend on how much heat the computations/mining itself generates - has to be some - and the total effort to make graphics cards or other hardware for a lot of clients that would not really exist if crypto wouldn't be a thing
i really doubt it. in a mining rig all power spent on components other than the GPU is essentially pure overhead that cuts into the thin margin of a consumer setup. you need several discrete GPUs before it starts to be worthwhile at all.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Any amount of mining will be profitable since your electricity is free. You could dig out a used Thinkpad from the closet and even though the hashrate would be miserable, you would still be making money since your electricity cost is zero. Of course you would probably want to use more efficient hardware to mine, and that's in terms of $/kWh.
I've got a GPU mining ethereum right now at about $0.75/kWh. Even in my apartment where electricity is $0.10/kWh I'm still turning a profit.
No, that number sounds like a marginal number to me. Someone else commented that miners pay an average of like 4 cents per kWh, which works out to about $30 of electricity costs to miners per transaction. Recent per-transaction miner fees are currently in the $10-20 range, but don't forget the winning miner gets a reward that's currently ~$330,475 per block.
No one smart enough to mine BTC is dumb enough to use GPUs for it, regardless of the price of electricity. If electricity is so cheap that there's profit to be made from GPU mining, the profit would be astronomically higher with ASIC mining.
But you're both completely missing the point that mining for coins will become exponentially more efficient over time, with new mining techniques and hardware.
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