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The world's Bitcoin mining in the aggregate uses surprisingly large amounts of electricity. Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan estimates that Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day, or somewhat more than the state of New York.

How does the dollar value of all bitcoin compare with the total cost of the electricity required to generate it? (Not over one day, but up to now.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Integrating the cost of bitcoin is difficult because the more miners you have, the more complex of a calculation is required thus cost goes up and down with the number of participants making integration impossible. $\endgroup$
    – The Thrifty Engineer
    Aug 27 '18 at 3:02
  • $\begingroup$ This is gonna be problematic, since we don't know where the miners are (and due to distributed anonymous nature of bitcoin, we are not able to find out) and the price of electricity is different in different countries - some power companies even offer different tariffs depending on your consumption and the time of the day. (But some rough estimates should be possible.) $\endgroup$
    – MikiRaven
    Aug 28 '18 at 20:17
  • $\begingroup$ I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is essentially a data request. While the data might then be used for economic analysis, this is fundamentally not an economic question but a data one. Unless this would be on-topic at the Bitcoin stack, I don't know that this question has a stack where it would be topical. $\endgroup$
    – Brythan
    Aug 29 '18 at 3:51
  • $\begingroup$ @Brythan, Its not necessarily a data request. The answer could be in the form a formula using whatever relevant standard or public data sources exist. Possibly a small subset or sample of that data might be sufficient to make an estimate. Such a formula might have interesting properties even without any input data. $\endgroup$
    – agc
    Aug 29 '18 at 9:16

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