[H-GEN] A modern mining rig

[Russell Stuart]

A container full of liquid cooled blades:

  http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/2/5165428/bitcoin-mine-in-hong-kong-uses-jelly-to-keep-cool

On a related I wondered just how much energy is devoted to bitcoin
mining.  From [0] we get the current hash rate of 38PH/s (Peta hashes
per second, Peta == 10^15).  From [1] we get an ball park ASIC mining
efficiency of 1GH/J (1 Gigga hashes / joule).

So the power used by mining (assuming it's all ASIC mining) is:

    38e15 [H/s] / 1e9 [H/J]       # [...] are units, a sanity check
  = 38e6 [J/s]
  = 38 MW                         # [J/s]==Watt, so Mega Watts

For comparison, a ball park figure for a typical household (averaged
over a year) is 300 W.



[0] https://blockchain.info/stats
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison