What’s the cost of mining a Bitcoin

[parishy]

What’s the cost of mining a Bitcoin
I have read numerous articles/posts online about the cost of mining a bitcoin. I have also heard at numerous conferences/events that the figure is at circa $4000. (No substantiation offered for this figure, but the figure I have heard muted usually sits around this value). I have often heard it as the reasoning bitcoin won’t drop below $4000 a coin.

Whilst I accept there will never be an exact figure for the price due to constantly varying factors ( cost of energy, hardware, labour/management, privacy etc etc). I do think we should be able to have an indicative cost/benchmark to create a bitcoin based on existing data. Maybe $4k is the correct figure, I am just interested in how that is calculated. I am not trying to say there is a correlation between the cost of mining the asset V the market value, but it can help give some indication of the “value/cost” for creating the asset, at the point of creation. This obviously won’t factor in any future value or use cases, it is merely a means of measuring the cost of creating the digital asset for use at that point in time, based on the real world consumption costs associated with creating it.

Example just taken off Twitter: The correct way to estimate Bitcoin energy usage by ######, not the invalid methodology used by Digiconomist cited in MSM FUD articles.

“Annual consumptiom: 35TW/year Capacity: 4000MW % world energy: 0.03% Cost: 1.7B$/year

Efficiency gains help offset increased consumption. This gives a total cost of $1,700,000,000.00 for worldwide consumption. “

Based on the above “calculation” that would mean each bitcoin has a creation cost of

1800 (bitcoins mined a day) X 365 ( days per year) = 657,000 Bitcoins a year (2018) $1,700,000,000/ 657,000 = $2,587.52 per bitcoin.

Obviously there are a lot of assumptions in the above assessment. -The figure doesn’t include a cost for hardware/maintenance. -The figure doesn’t include any housing or management costs. -The energy $ value makes an assumption of $TW which does change considerably depending on location.

Any links or info that would help add some meat to this would be appreciated.

Mucho Mucho

[Tomas_Novak]

1 BTC = 18000kW

[CSZiggy]

Can we make a new forum rule about posting on a dead thread more than 30 days after the last post?

I know it's getting close to Halloween, but do we really need to be bringing the dead back to life already?
I realize its a new person who never made a post and has to before they start a topic or whatever, but refreshing 2 month old threads? really?

[Steve Sokolowski]

Can we make a new forum rule about posting on a dead thread more than 30 days after the last post?

I know it's getting close to Halloween, but do we really need to be bringing the dead back to life already?
I realize its a new person who never made a post and has to before they start a topic or whatever, but refreshing 2 month old threads? really?

There already is a setting enabled where if a thread is more than two weeks old, someone can post to it, but it won't be displayed on the frontpage as the most recent thread.

[Rundgau]

The topic is interesting, so why don’t we continue discussing it? I agree that there’s no sense of such global generalization. We can’t say about overall cost of mining because there’re a lot of countries with different electricity prices. To create detailed stats, we should explore price for each state, then combine results in the single graph/table or create infographic. Also, I doubt that price of Bitcoin mining can define the lowest possible price of Bitcoin itself. These numbers correlate but other factors influence the price too.