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An earlier answer claims it would burn around $2M worth of electricity to confirm one block using an ordinary CPU. See: Energy to confirm one block? Can anyone estimate what this figure would be for today's state-of-the-art mining hardware?
E.g., suppose I am presented with a chain of 8 block headers with mining difficulty at or above current level. Without any other information, how certain could I be that they were generated by current blockchain network? How much would it cost to create a fake, ignoring equipment cost?
Distinguish what a "fake" chain of blocks is. – Anonymous – 2018-09-30T01:25:36.517
@eponymous "fake" that includes a transaction which is not really on the Bitcoin public chain. – user1055568 – 2018-09-30T02:05:12.200
1I have just added an answer to that question explaining how to calculate this for yourself. It's not that I don't want to help you directly, but we have had this question several times, with people wanting updates every time, and I want to end the cycle. – Nate Eldredge – 2018-09-30T02:22:27.627
1@NateEldredge thanks, I come up with $61,502 for one block at $.08/kwh using miner with 111,00 MH/J. – user1055568 – 2018-09-30T16:42:19.527
Yes, that sounds right. A good sanity check is to compare with the current block reward: 12.5 BTC, at a market price of about $6,600/BTC, is $82,500. So there is a decent but not ridiculous margin to cover hardware costs, maintenance, cooling, infrastructure, and overhead, and hopefully still turn a profit. – Nate Eldredge – 2018-09-30T18:11:54.097