There’s a gold rush going on these days, or a Bitcoin rush, at least. Driven by the recent swings in the value of a Bitcoin, more and more people are learning about and becoming interested in the currency. While they could just buy Bitcoins at the current market rate, others are looking to try their luck at mining Bitcoins. And like prospectors who traveled west during the Gold Rush of the 19th century, many Bitcoin miners will find that they spend more on chasing the Bitcoin dream than they’ll ever hope to win back.

As explained here, Bitcoins are “mined” by unlocking blocks of data that “produce a particular pattern when the Bitcoin ‘hash’ algorithm is applied to the data.” It seems simple enough, but the cost of Bitcoin mining is greater than one might expect. The more Bitcoins are mined, the more difficult it becomes to find the next block. Unless the miner is using the latest specially-designed mining rigs, the computers used often sport high-end graphics cards (since the GPUs are more efficient than CPUs for mining application). And running those computers requires a lot of power.

Blockchain.info, which tracks Bitcoin-related data, estimates that miners are using 1, 005.59 megawatt hours of electrical consumption each day in their pursuit of new blocks of Bitcoins. That ends up costing about $150, 000 in power costs each day to mine the currency. [Hat tip to Bloomberg for reporting on the data.]

That may sound like a lot, but miners on average are making money. According to Blockchain, miners are generating $470, 000 in Bitcoin-related revenue per day. In fact, due to the recent interest in the virtual currency and its popularity, operating margins for Bitcoin miners are close to record highs.

Source: techcrunch.com