Uh...Power in the US costs 30+ cents/kWh? In which part of the country??
In Ontario, Canada, the price is about 6.7 cents/kWh during the night and peaks at 12.4 cents/kWh in the afternoon.
http://www.ontarioenergyboard.ca/OEB/Consumers/Electricity/E...
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...
In the Europe the story is quite similar. The country with the most expensive electricity is Denmark at 29.5 but most vary between 10 and 20 cents.
In the US power costs usually between 8-12 cents per kilowatt hour. There are extra costs if your commercial which can add 10-20%.
We've found that power cost, especially commercial power is oddly hard to estimate with "demand charges" and rates varrying with time... There are a few companies compiling this cost data in detail which we'll likely be buying soon.
Here in NZ, I get a generation charge, a national lines charge, and a local lines charge per kwh. Then I've got an additional daily charge to be connected to the network. It works out to NZ$0.22/kwh.
Electricity isn't very useful when it's at the hydro lake!
[Edited to add numbers] Looking into it, Ontario power is:
(Peak 11AM-5PM) 12.4c/kWh generation. 3.37c/kWh distribution 1.21c/kWh transmission
$17.29/mo connection.
So, that's CDN16.98c/kWh delivered to a suburban home.
Still, nowhere near 30c/kWh.
Notably Tiyo Triyanto, the miner quoted in the opening paragraphs, is now mining Litecoin instead of Bitcoin and betting on prices increasing before the ASIC arms race starts for that cryptocurrency.
400kWh is $127.93 or 32cents/kWh
Oh, and that's a flat rate.
source wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Ind...
If Indonesia uses thermal power then using the electricity generated from it has little negative environmental impact.
Additionally I'm unclear where anything is "making profits from cheap labor". The miner benefits from the low cost of living in Jakarta, but making that out to be a bad thing is like complaining that housing in Kansas isn't as expensive as New York.
Thermal as in burning fossil fuels, not geothermal.
Edit: Also, depending on how you want to look at it, the hour value is a bit off. $114/day * 7 days/week / 40 hours/week = $19.95.
Bitcoin difficulty has risen MASSIVELY lately.
Mining is a business, many businesses are capital intensive.
From this calculator: http://dustcoin.com/, you need about 60,000 KH/S to make $114 a day (excluding power cost). One of the most efficient $/hashrate GPUs for litecoin mining is the ATI 7950 at about $210 a piece and ~600 KH/s. 105 * 600 KH/s = ~60000 KH/s = ~$114, so it works out. That's $20,000. So if you spend $20,000 you can buy yourself a job that pays $114 a day. It will take 6 months just to break even. Better hope the difficulty hasn't increased enough in that time to make your GPUs irrelevant (hint: it probably will).
Keep in mind that I was very generously excluding the very significant cost of power, the very significant cost of all the motherboards/cpu/ram/power supplies to run those GPUs, and the power and space required to cool them. Realistically we're looking at more like $50k.
>“Currently I’m making about 60 litecoin per day,” he said. “I’ve kept 95% of the mining profit since April and once the major exchanges start accepting LTC, others will follow, and price is expected to soar. So that 60 LTC could turn into $1,500.”
This is absurd. If he thinks 60 LTC will be worth $1,500, he should spend the $20,000 he spent on GPUs on LTC instead. He'd turn $20,000 into $250,000 with no work required (another hint: assuming you can turn $20k into $250k in 6 months with no work as a sure thing is also absurd).
He'd make far more money if he wrote an e-book on how to cram 105 GPUs into your apartment to mine BTC.
This might pay off mining 60LTC per day and hoarding them. The guy who started Litecoin now works for Coinbase, which may adopt Litecoin and will no doubt start a gigantic speculation bubble this Indonesian dude can cash out with http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/litecoin/
The only problem I see is the reliability of the electricity provider itself. There are frequent surges and parts of Jakarta are known to experience regular rolling blackouts.
