Part 14/19:
The Economics of Mining: Energy, Hardware, and Geography
Mining’s economic aspects are scrutinized in detail: hardware cost, energy consumption, network latency, and geographical distribution all influence a miner’s effectiveness. China, with cheap coal-based electricity, dominates mining industry due to lower operational costs, though high latency imposes propagation disadvantages for larger blocks.
The speaker emphasizes that the vast computational effort—the trillions of hashes performed per second—drives energy consumption and heats hardware, underlining that Bitcoin mining is fundamentally an energy-intensive industry, justified by the security and trust mechanisms its proof-of-work provides.