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Comment by 1053r | Hacker News Reader

So the biggest problem with this post is that blockchain.info specifically says that they assume 650W per GigaHash. This is just out of date.

Modern ASIC miners (which are doing the majority of the mining) are doing more like 10W per GigaHash.[1]

So we only need 1/65th of what is being estimated.

1) http://millybitcoin.com/does-bitcoin-mining-use-a-large-amou...

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10W/GH is a pretty old number. A lot of miners are now around 6W/GH on average from butterfly labs & asicminer. Newer miners that have been released in last few months are 1.5W/GH from KNC & BitFury. In a couple of months it's going to be 0.7W/GH from Cointerra and Hashfast.

The amount of hash power in reaction to these cheaper and more efficient miners is going to go up although, so the total power consumed is going to be similar in the end.

I assume you mean 10 joules per GigaHash (with ASICs), a joule being a watt-second.

Put another way, such an ASIC doing a GigaHash per second would consume 10W.

It's bad enough that science journalists routinely confuse energy and power units -- let's not do it here on HN!

What’s the source of that - that the majority of Bitcoin miners are using ASICs? From everything I’ve read they’re new, in scarce supply with lead times of up to a year, and expensive.

"The majority of Bitcoin miners are using ASICs" and "the majority of the mining is being done by ASIC miners" are two distinct claims.

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