Cardano Co-Founder Reveals Satoshi's Bitcoin Mining Costs Were Shockingly Low

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson estimated that the cost of electricity that Satoshi Nakamoto, the leading cryptocurrency's mysterious co-founder, spent to mine 1 million BTC would have been less than $3,700.

Hoskinson presented three different scenarios that demonstrate how much electricity it would have taken Nakamoto to mine 1 million bitcoins between 2009 and 2010.

The creator of Bitcoin mined his coins in conditions of extremely low mining difficulty, almost complete absence of competition and using the central processor for mining.

The scenarios in the table illustrate different possible methods by which Satoshi could mine coins, based on various assumptions about the number of mining rigs, their power, operating hours, and the price of electricity.

Just one mining rig, consuming an average of 190 watts of power and running 75% of the time for 485 days, would be the most efficient and minimal configuration. If Satoshi were the only person mining on a decent consumer PC or server, it might look like this. In that case, the cost would be $191.

However, based on the Patoshi model, discovered by researcher Sergio Lerner by analyzing non-random patterns of nonces in early Bitcoin blocks, it is possible that a single actor (likely Satoshi) was using a cluster of machines to mine the cryptocurrency. This would be the most plausible scheme, which would push the cost up to $575 in the U.S. and nearly $1,000 outside the country.

If Satoshi had needed more energy to stay competitive and cope with the increasing mining difficulty, the total cost would have increased to the above $3,700.

As reported by U.Today, Nakamoto, whose true identity remains a secret, is currently considered one of the wealthiest people in the world, recently overtaking Bill Gates. His fortune is estimated at $120 billion.

In other news, Ripple CTO David Schwartz recently revealed that he holds a total of 250 bitcoins (BTC) when the cryptocurrency was trading at around $30.

Source: cryptonews.net