In recent days Bitcoin made a lot of buzz and exhibited a very high volatility in the price: after reaching $ 260 by Bitcoin has plummeted to between 50 and 80 dollars then up again at $120, all in between 4 days.

As you know Bitcoin was invented in 2009 after the global financial crisis by a mysterious computer genius under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The creation of new bitcoins is automated and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” by solving complex mathematical programs.  When a new batch of coins is ready, they’re distributed to whomever had the highest computing power in the mining process. each new block is awarded approximately every 10 minutes. Bloomberg did a report on how much electricity miners consume daily.

If you think mining is a profitable business, just have a look at stats by blockchain.info/stats, miners located worldwide burned $141,913.69  in Electricity cost, consuming 946.09 megawatt hours and 60,646.88 GH/s computational power in last 24 hours. Blockchain.info calculated on the basis of power consumption of 650 Watts per gigahash and electricity price of 15 cent per kilowatt hour. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider.

/Via Bloomberg/

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