How much does it cost to run a full node for a worldwide…
0 reactions
How much does it cost to run a full node for a worldwide monetary network? Answer inside.
Most BTCers claim to be concerned if they will be able to run full nodes if we let Bitcoin scale.
I'll show how one can easily calculate these costs so get better information to make better decisions.
First lets make some educated guesses:
- We want to look at node running at different adoption rates. We will look at:
- 1% (200 times the capability of BTC
- 25% (5000 times the capability of BTC)
- 80% (A mind blowing 16000 times the capability of BTC)
- We assume 1.3 transaction per person per day. Sources: frbservices.org/news/press-releases/051325-findings-from-2025-diary-of-consumer-payment-choice ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op201.en.pdf
- An average monetary transaction has the size of 250 Byte (2 in 2 out)
- We take our disk prices from here: backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ ~$15 per terabyte
With all that we can now calculate our costs.
With these we can now calculate the block sizes for each:
8billion * X% * 0.000250/24/6
- 1% 181 MB
- 25% 4.5 GB
- 80% 14 GB
And the needed diskspace per year:
8billion * X% * 1.3 * 365 * 0.000000000250
- 1% 10 TB
- 25% 240 TB
- 80% 760 TB
And lastly we can calculate our cost with todays Disk prices:
- 1% $190 per year
- 25% $4700 per year
- 80% $15200 per year
As comparison a Netflix premiums account costs $324.
So for the price of a Netflix account we could already serve 1% of the population with sound p2p money. Likely more, because this amount of transaction would actually enable people to use L2s self custodial and likely boost our numbers ~50 times.
Even the 80% goal is not out of this world. How much will storage prices fall in the next decade? How much does an average westerner spend for a hobby? I have seen people spend thousands of dollars for games.
#cryptocurrency
Most BTCers claim to be concerned if they will be able to run full nodes if we let Bitcoin scale.
I'll show how one can easily calculate these costs so get better information to make better decisions.
First lets make some educated guesses:
- We want to look at node running at different adoption rates. We will look at:
- 1% (200 times the capability of BTC
- 25% (5000 times the capability of BTC)
- 80% (A mind blowing 16000 times the capability of BTC)
- We assume 1.3 transaction per person per day. Sources: frbservices.org/news/press-releases/051325-findings-from-2025-diary-of-consumer-payment-choice ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op201.en.pdf
- An average monetary transaction has the size of 250 Byte (2 in 2 out)
- We take our disk prices from here: backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ ~$15 per terabyte
With all that we can now calculate our costs.
With these we can now calculate the block sizes for each:
8billion * X% * 0.000250/24/6
- 1% 181 MB
- 25% 4.5 GB
- 80% 14 GB
And the needed diskspace per year:
8billion * X% * 1.3 * 365 * 0.000000000250
- 1% 10 TB
- 25% 240 TB
- 80% 760 TB
And lastly we can calculate our cost with todays Disk prices:
- 1% $190 per year
- 25% $4700 per year
- 80% $15200 per year
As comparison a Netflix premiums account costs $324.
So for the price of a Netflix account we could already serve 1% of the population with sound p2p money. Likely more, because this amount of transaction would actually enable people to use L2s self custodial and likely boost our numbers ~50 times.
Even the 80% goal is not out of this world. How much will storage prices fall in the next decade? How much does an average westerner spend for a hobby? I have seen people spend thousands of dollars for games.
#cryptocurrency
| 4,000 mlx | |
| 9 | |
| 0 |