In Order to Keep Bitcoin Blockchain Safe, it Costs Approx $7M: Messari

On 25th March, a new screener was published by the cryptocurrency data portal Messari about the revenues that are paid to the miners for top listed ‘proof of work’ coins. The estimation was made based on calculating the new issuance and transaction fees. As a result, it turned out that among all the ‘proof of work’ assets, Bitcoin churned out the maximum output. On an everyday basis, 7.392 million U.S Dollars worth of BTC tokens are issued. Further, more than 115,000 U.S Dollars are distributed in the mining costs.

On the other hand, looking at the daily issuance cost of Ethereum, it was found that it was approximately 6 times lower than that of Bitcoin. It is 1.85 million U.S. Dollars. The trading cost of Ethereum is also half. It is 58.23k U.S. Dollars which is paid to the ‘proof of work’ miners. This figure may change since Ethereum is switching to ‘proof of stake’ this year. Bitcoin and Ethereum are paying 0.1 percent of their current market capitalization, as per the reports.

The above figures are spent on miners just to make sure that the ‘proof of work’ network stays safe against the probable fifty-one percent attacks. It seems that only Bitcoin and Ethereum networks are the only two networks that are sending this kind of amount for the safety purpose. Moving to other networks, for instance- Litecoin puts in around 936 Million U.S. Dollars, whereas ZCash spends 400 U.S. Dollars, and last but not the least- Bitcoin Cash spends around 280 Million U.S. Dollars to ensure the safety of the network. On Twitter, a user with the profile name ‘twobitidiot’ posted-

“BTC costs $7 million / day to secure. ETH is less than $2 million. Nothing else is in the seven figures.”

Spending such amounts on safety ensures a layer of protection against hackers. If anytime a hacker desires to crack into these networks, he would need to outweigh the combined issuance costs for getting control over the network. Other than the costs, other challenges such as electricity, mining devices, physical space in order to successfully hack these networks.

On the other hand, there has been this constant headache for the banking industry and other related financial industry due to cybercrime. This threat makes the big financial infrastructures to spend a lot on safety measures. For example, in 2016, JP Morgan & Chase spent 500 Million U.S. Dollars for securing itself against cybercrime. Another example is from Citibank. The bank spent around 300 Million U.S. Dollars for ensuring safety. Wells Fargo also spends a good amount of 250 Million U.S. Dollars annually to ensure online safety. Calculating the total costs of money spent by these three banks alone, it comes out to be 1.5 Billion U.S. Dollars. Therefore, around 4.1 Million U.S. Dollars are spent every 24 hours for safety against cybercrime. These were just a few examples. Of course, there are a few banks that spend way more than what Bitcoin is spending on online security.

Roxanne Williams

Roxanne Williams has recently joined as a market reporter for CryptoNewsZ - the 24/7 crypto news site, where she produces recent stories, technical analysis and price updates on world's leading cryptocurrencies.

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