Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: Nxt :: descendant of Bitcoin - Updated Information
by
rickyjames
on 12/01/2014, 05:00:24 UTC
I need a little advice: How can we calculate a daily cost of Nxt web?

Something like:
number of peers x watts of the average computer? and transfer kW in Dollars?

Do we know a number of forging computers?

I do a simple calculation for you as following:

Say 10, 000 nodes in the network for Nxt, as you know there are about 10,000 accounts.

Say each node is a Pi, say each pi consumes 10Watts, so total 100kW, it's 2400 kWh, which is just $600 a day with $0.25 per kWh.

Say each node is a server with 500 Watts, that's 50 times of the above calculation, so it is about $30,000 a day.

So I predict a total power consumption is in the range of $600 ~ $30,000 a day, and most probably below $10000.

Wow, that's the most efficient system in the crypto currency world.


Edit: go on a simple calculation of the price for Nxt. Presently a day's tx fee is ~ 5000 Nxt, if it should cover the power consumption, that is, $600/5000 ~ $30,000/5000, so the Nxt price in the range $0.12 ~ $6.

Yeah, my pricing for Nxt is $0.12 ~ $6.



But there are 300 nodes, not 10k:

http://peerexplorer.com/

Quote
donate(1), 22k(3), 22k.io(66), BEER(1), CentOS(2), FreeBSD(1), linux(6), NCC-1701-D(1), NCC-1864(1), nxt.now.im(12), nxt86(2), PC(121), PC BaiMang...(2), PC-2212(1), Raspberry(1), RaspNXT(1), Rpi(1), RPi Solari...(1), SPARC(1), strawberry(1), Unknown(43), VPS(17), xrp.pw/nxt(1):

(4+66+1+1+12+2+43+17+1)x20W = 3kW
+
(2+6+1+1+121+2+1+1+1+1+1+1+1)x5W = 0.7kW

= 4kW

24(hours)x4(kW)x0.15/kWh = 14 USD

A Raspberry Pi only uses 2W at most:  400ma @ 5V.  This has to come from a power supply that has some conversion efficiency of 50-80% or so.  Let's be conservative and say we're using a 50% efficient wall plug transformer.  Then each Raspberry is using 4W of wall power to generate the 2W it actually needs to run.  Say electricity is $0.15 per kWh.  Then in a year of 365*24 = 8760 hours, a single Raspberry Pi is going to use 8760 * 4 = 35,040 watt-hours or 35 kWh per year costing 35 * 0.15 = $5.25 of electricity per year.  

Thus the power to run a Pi is thus real but pretty negligible in the overall cost picture.  You can run 25 Pis nonstop for a solid year for the same amount of juice required to leave a 100W incandescent bulb on day and night for a year.

As a reasonable estimate, a single Pi costs around $120 as capital outlay to set it up for a year of service as an NXT node:  $35 for the Pi itself; $30 more for the memory card, cables, cluster support gear, etc; $ 5 for a year's worth of power; and say $50 per year (around $4 / mo) to park it in a server farm.  A network of 300 Pis thus costs $36,00 to set up and run for a year (of which $15,000 per year or $1250 per month is "office rental" and "human tech support" and "internet bandwidth").  

If there are truly 5000 NXT per day generated in transaction fees as assumed above, that's 365*5000 = 1,825,000 NXT per year.  If you are using 300 Pis at $36,000 per year to capture ALL those transaction fees, you are spending $36,000 / 1,825,000 NXT = $0.02 per NXT or around 2 pennies per NXT to capture the NXT using Raspberry Pis.  At 0.00005 BTC/NXT and $800/BCT, a NXT is currently worth $0.04 or 4 pennies each.  

Rough ballpark estimate: Capturing NXT with Raspberry Pis could double your money in a year at current NXT prices.  The Raspberry cost is fixed; the return-on-investment ROI gets better and better the higher and higher NXT goes.

http://coen.boisestate.edu/ece/files/2013/05/Creating.a.Raspberry.Pi-Based.Beowulf.Cluster_v2.pdf

I seem to recall that people are setting up VPSs for around $20 per month or $240 per year, which is double the cost of setting up a Raspberry Pi for a year as outlined above.  Thus while NXT is at its current $0.04 each, capturing NXT with VPSs is a break-even proposition.

These are actually great numbers.  The return-on-investment or ROI for forging NXT is positive NOW and will be even more profitable when NXT coins become more valuable.  Thus even with NXT as a Proof-of-Stake coin without mining, there is STILL financial motivation for people to run the nodes required to keep the NXT system going.  For a pre-mined coin, that is a remarkable statement.

Oh and the daily cost of the NXT support web running on 300 Raspberry Pi nodes is $36,000 / 365 = $98.63 per day, call it $100 per day.  Do it on 300 VPSs instead, and the daily NXT support web cost is around $200 per day.