New Jersey-based electric supply company Elite Fixtures has published a very interesting piece of research - a list of the price of mining one Bitcoin in 114 different countries.
The research is a follow-up to a comprehensive study of Bitcoin mining costs in each state of the US, as published by Crescent Electric, the parent company of Elite Fixtures.
Bitcoin mining requires serious amounts of electricity - worldwide, the industry's energy needs are equal to almost 10 percent of the electricity consumed by the entire UK. This is because the only way to profit from mining Bitcoin nowadays is to work to scale, with large numbers of hard-running and power-hungry mining computers.
Given a current Bitcoin price of 11,332 USD (according to coinmarketcap.com), one could still technically make a profit by mining in the majority of countries examined. In reality however, the cost and expertise required to set up the equipment causes the operation to be a non-starter for most.
Mining centres first developed on a large scale in China, where electricity is cheap and things can be built big. However as the government began cracking down on the industry, companies began looking at other places. Iceland is one popular destination for example, with its cheap electricity and cold climate, but the spokesman of an Icelandic energy company recently remarked that the country may not be able to supply enough electricity to support all the mining operations that intend to set up shop there.
Venezuela is the cheapest place to mine in the world at the moment, because electricity is heavily subsidised by the government - here it would cost you only 531 USD per bitcoin.
The most expensive place is South Korea, where it will cost you a staggering 26,170 USD to mine one bitcoin. Cryptocurrency costs being higher in South Korea than elsewhere is a recognised phenomenon with its own name - the 'Kimchi premium'.
