Crypto
Mining Economics Were Bleak Just Before Bitcoin's Price Surge
A resurfaced Bitcoin forum post from September 7, 2010 reveals just how much the economics of mining have changed.
At the time, one early user calculated that producing a single block on their home computer would cost roughly $5.68 in electricity.
The user, TTBit, said they had connected a Kill-a-Watt electricity meter to their computer and measured power consumption at roughly 140 watts with the monitors switched off.
Their machine was producing around 2,200 kilohashes per second, but it would take approximately 14 days and two hours to successfully mine one Bitcoin block based on the difficulty.
The user estimated that it would consume approximately 47.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity at an electricity rate of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.