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I'm trying to estimate the Wattage used in mining operations over time and compare that YoY cost with mining physical materials (gold, silver, etc). I hope that the electrical impact is less than that of mining for precious metals, but I'd like to quantify that to be sure.
- What are some approaches I can use to measure and extrapolate the electrical and hardware cost of mining over the years?
Some data points that would assist in gathering this information would be
- When was CPU mining invented/popularized? To what extent?
- When was GPU mining invented/popularized? To what extent?
- When was FPGA mining invented/popularized? To what extent?
- When was ASIC mining invented/popularized? To what extent?
- What is the average cost of the above components?
For example, do we know how many FPGAs were in the wild on a per-vendor basis? How much of the hashrate did that consume and what is left over?