Comment by pash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pash | Hacker News Reader

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China is the place where the marginal cost of mining is lowest. It's the only place in the world where a command economy has hybridized with crony capitalism to offer you as much electricity as you want at below-market prices; if the otherwise idle hydropower station that was built 300 miles from any center of population or industry under the last five-year plan can't give you all the juice you can use, you can get more from your choice of local coal-fired power plants at six cents per kilowatt-hour (after a small consideration to the provincial party chief).

The other major reason that Bitcoin mining is big in China is that it's far and away the biggest source of capital looking to escape government controls. You put in yuan at one end, turning it into ASICs and electricity, and you take bitcoin out at the other end. Say what you want about bitcoin, but it's a whole lot easier than your yuan deposits at the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China to get across the border.

Some day these things will change. But for now, Bitcoin is stuck with Chinese miners.

China is certainly not the place where the marginal cost of mining is the lowest.

I moved my GPU mining farm in 2011 to Douglas County, Washington state where my electricity cost was 2 cents per kWh. China does not beat that. In fact to this day none of the large professional mining farms beat this cost. At best they match it: in 2013 the first professional miners—MegaBigPower—came into Douglas County... http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/apr/26/northwests-chea...

Yes, there are Chinese bitcoin miners paying even less than that for power.

China has a quarter of the world's hydroelectric generating capacity, but its utilization rate is low, far lower than in places like the Unites States, Canada, or Norway. This is primarily because much of the potential hydropower cannot be absorbed by the grid in western China, where many dams have been built over the past decade on the rivers flowing off the Tibetan plateau. Bitcoin mining operations are the rare customers that can show up near an isolated, idle hydropower station and gobble up electricity from turbines that otherwise wouldn't even be spinning.

The other factor I mentioned, that bitcoin mining in China provides an added return in the form of expatriated revenue, does not enter into the calculation of marginal cost. But it does effectively add several percent—the price of moving money out of China via other mechanisms—to Chinese miners' marginal revenue. And it's marginal revenue minus marginal cost that matters, not marginal cost alone.

Why are these hydroelectric plants not connected to the main grid that powers Shanghai and Beijing? If the turbines are otherwise literally turned off, surely the transmission losses become irrelevant?

It sounds like a distance and power storage issue.

According to Wikipedia the distance shouldn't be an issue with HVDC lines and there's no need to store power, you can take some of the coal plants near the cities offline.

I don't believe large mining farms in China pay less than 2 cents per kWh. But if you have sources, quote them. I would like to be proven wrong.

For example the lowest Chinese costs I remember reading were from a remote farm who benefits from hydro power and admits that paying 3 cents per kWh is already "on the cheap side": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1072474.msg11472186#... Farms don't usually disclose how much they pay (strategically sensitive number), but I always do some back-of-the-napkin math when possible, eg. when they release approximate figures, and I usually calculate somewhere between 4 and 10 cents per kWh.

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