The Potential of Solar Energy for the Digital Currency Industry

Published: 30 Mar 2016

You may of seen on our Twitter feed and Facebook page things like 'welcome to the age of the Solar powered money'. We truly mean that. The value of the dollar is to a large degree propped up by oil, aka the petro-dollar. Now, consider that any Bitcoin miner can create digital currency from a computer. Not all digital currency mines are solar powered (for now at least) and they still need to increase in efficiency a great deal. But, the Bitcoins are still being created out of thin air, just from crunching numbers, and can now be used to install a physical solar photovoltaic electricity generator that will run for 25 years..... Is that not just the most incredible thing? It still blows my mind when I comprehend it. If you doubt this amazinglness of this in anyway, take a look at the numbers.....

The Bitcoin network, at present, doles out 3600 BTC per day. It has been estimated that the constant power draw of the Bitcoin mining network is 215MW, so 5.16GWh per day. That means that each Bitcoin embodies 1.4333 MWh. One Bitcoin is worth, lets just say for simplicity, $400USD. The cost of a fully installed rooftop solar plant upto 1 MW in capacity will average out at about $1.5/W. So your Bitcoin will fund you 266W of completely installed solar system. If you locate that solar system somewhere nice and sunny like South Africa, it will generate 500 kWh per year. So, in less than three years, the energy required to mine the Bitcoin will have been paid back by the solar energy it financed. So you see, this is effectively a 'perpetual motion' system. But where the laws of physics would usually ensure that infinite energy is not physically possible, the human element that creates the value of the Bitcoin, ensures that this process just keeps on going. All the way to the sun!