Megawatts to Bitcoin : Mining in Theory and in Practice

Bitcoin mining takes as much electricity as the entire country of Czech Republic. The first and ultimate Proof of Work algorithm envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 spawned a global race for cheap electricity, development of specialized ASIC mining machines and a land grab to build specialized data centers for mining.

In this talk we will go over the basics: the SHA256 algo, basic ASIC infrastructure, what does it take to run a mine, regulatory and environmental concerns, the cost of entry and generally the do's and dont's.

"The proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits. The average work required is exponential in the number of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash. For our timestamp network, we implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the block until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required zero bits."