Whereas, precise figures are “very difficult to determine”, Elliptic estimates are based mostly on information collected from bitcoin miners by the Cambridge Centre for Various Finance up to April 2020, Array Instagram and statements from Iran’s state-managed power generation firm in January that up to 600 MW of electricity was being consumed by miners.

Hashrate to BTC conversion. The pool will reward the miner in response to the number of shares submitted and accepted. Every pool has a unique payout coverage. One in every of the preferred policies is “Pay Per Share” (PPS) which usually has a pool price connected to it. Since the ultimate calculation for share fee relies on the precise mining activity of the pool, it is difficult to supply an actual estimate of each share payout. Nevertheless, most swimming pools publish a hashrate to BTC (Bitcoin) fee of conversion for miner verification purposes. On the time of writing this paper, the conversion charge on the F2Pool was 0.00246248 BTC per TH/s [30].

This incongruity has change into stark: scores of tech companies with plush places of work in Shenzhen and Shanghai purport to be engaged in synthetic intelligence, big information processing, or blockchain for industrial use, however in reality they earn their cash from crypto mining at faraway dams and power plants. “There’s no different motive you need so much processing energy for any blockchain tech,” says cryptocurrency guide Nishant Sharma, founding father of Beijing-based BlocksBridge Consulting.