How much electricity does Bitcoin mining use
More and more #Bitcoin miners are switching over to Linux, meaning that this particular cryptocurrency is using a lot of electricity. This is mainly because the process of mining Bitcoin uses a lot of computing power and as computers get more powerful, they're able to mine more Bitcoins in the same amount of time. For example, it would take five years for one person with a laptop computer mining on their own to generate enough Bitcoins for even a modest down payment on a house.
The other thing that's important about electricity usage is how much energy you'll need for each Bitcoin you mine. This is a big question because Bitcoins are so expensive right now that you can make just as much money by buying dirt-cheap electricity on the wholesale market. Even if you keep the money in a Bitcoin wallet, the electricity costs would still be free.
The first thing to understand is that #Bitcoin mining is a competition between miners who are trying to solve algorithms. This competition involves guessing which way of applying brute force computing power to guess at values within an encryption system will generate more Bitcoins than any other output. This guess is placed in a data structure known as the blockchain, which everyone can see and everyone can verify.
Each miner has to make around 21 million guesses a second, outnumbering all other contenders, in order to keep up. This is why mining for Bitcoin involves so much computing power and why it's so expensive.
There are two main ways of mining for Bitcoin: solo and pool mining. Solo mining is where you have the computational power to mine on your own, but you're competing against the entire network of all other miners who also have such computational power. Pool mining is where you join up with other miners to share their computational power; this encourages everyone to pool together their resources instead of fighting individually against each other.
The amount of computing power you'd need to solo mine depends on the type of Bitcoin system you're using. The "Legacy" or "Classic" version of Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (PoW) mining, whereas the current system uses proof-of-stake (PoS) mining. PoW has been going on for a long time and is far more energy intensive than PoS mining, so it's not as much of an issue right now. But if Bitcoin is ever like gold, the amount of energy consumed by mining will be a major factor in how valuable each coin is and how much people are willing to pay for that coin.
There are a few interesting forks of Bitcoin that use different algorithms. One of these is the "Classic" or "Legacy" version of Bitcoin, which uses PoW mining to mine Bitcoins. The other is the current version, which uses PoS mining. In both cases, each block mined in the blockchain contains a reward for both transaction fees and new coins being mined. The current version has a much lower transaction fee than Classic does, which means that PoS coins are worth more than PoW coins even though they take less electricity to generate. This means that there's a strong incentive to switch over from using computers that generate PoW blocks to using computers that generate Proof-of-Stake blocks.
With both systems, the way you find a valid block that contains a reward for miners is the same: guess which transaction it's based on. If the transaction has enough work done in it and if you're lucky and guess right, you'll end up with a random number and if you're even luckier and guess even more right, you'll get to see how much work was done in the transaction. The difference between them is how lucky you have to be in order to find that random number before anybody else does.
So what Bitcoin miners are actually competing for are not just Bitcoins themselves but also computational power and luck as well as whatever Bitcoins might become worth when they're an actual currency. This is why getting a hard drive full of Bitcoins instead of trying to get more computing power and more luck is a better way to try and make money because it's easy to sell your hard drive at the right time. This is also why buying dirt-cheap electricity on the wholesale market makes more sense than mining Bitcoin yourself.
If you're willing to spend time doing something potentially pointless that might end up being worth something later, then you'll probably be able to turn a profit from #Bitcoin mining. This is because all the electricity that miners use for PoW mining isn't necessarily wasted; it's just going into something that isn't likely to pay off at the moment. The difference between miners and miners is that the people buying and selling Bitcoins are actively chasing after them, not just hoping to make something out of nothing.
Here are some nice Bitcoin mining calculators:
https://www.bitcoinx.com/calculator/bcn-mining-calculator/
https://bitcoinzebra.com/calculator/bitcoin-mining-calculator/