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by Osiris 4594 days ago
It does seem a bit wasteful, but companies producing ASICs are fighting for lower power consumption. I would expect future power consumption per GH/s to go down.
2 comments

Watts/(GH/s) will go down because of ASICs, but that will make mining more lucrative and they will have to up the difficulty which raises Watts/(GH/s).
While making GFlops/watt cheaper for all number crunching applications, no?
Not if it's just because we're building bitcoin-specific ASICs. It might help push technology, but it'll also pull brain-power that would otherwise have been focused elsewhere. It's hard to know what the counterfactual would actually look like.
> future power consumption per GH/s to go down.

But you'll need more hashes, so it'll go back up.

The current price of a bitcoin is almost exactly equal to its energy cost, and that's not going to change because if the price was higher people would spend more energy, if lower people will cut back.