You’re not wrong.

Wholesale prices do bounce around significantly in a day, occasionally even going negative. And some miners do shutdown for brief periods during high demand due to a high electricity price. Some miners aren’t buying electricity from the grid, and have their own generation sources with different economic inputs. And there’s lots of day to day volatility in mining rates that has nothing to do with economics.

There’s no formula or methodology that could tell you how much energy is being wasted at any given moment. That impossible. There’s no way of knowing how many miners are operating globally at any given point in time. We can’t even reliably tell which country a block was mined in. We can only make reasonable estimates of global averages over the last few weeks.

You can get closer with more detailed modelling, but the equation I gave using global averages for bitcoin and electricity prices in the last few weeks will get you to an accurate estimate.

Yes somewhat… the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.

For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.

The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.

Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.

Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.

Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country

The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.

No.

MW is the maximum capacity not the average.

A nuclear reactor runs at close to its maximum output pretty much 24/7/365.

A solar farm only operates during the day, and even then it only operates at maximum output in the middle of a clear sunny day.

The overall average output of a nuclear plant is typically around 90% of its capacity.

The overall average output of solar farm is 20-25%.

This massive farm will still only output a bit more electricity than what a single nuclear reactor outputs.

A nuclear power station typically has more than one reactor, so compared to a typical nuclear power station this isn’t even close to the average nuclear plant.

Though it does beat a few of the smallest nuclear plants that only have a single reactor.

Nuclear outputs a fuck-ton of electricity for its size.

Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.

That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.

The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.