Re: Seniors, how much does it cost to develop a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin?

There's no PoW-based cryptocurrency can be mined for free. You'll need to pay for the hardware and electricity.

It makes Proof of Work cryptocurrencies are harder to die but if miners stop mining, their networks will be dead chains.

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In past, service called Forkgen let you create Bitcoin fork easily with relative low cost[1].

[1] https://thenextweb.com/news/forkgen-makes-it-easyish-to-create-your-own-bitcoin-fork

I don't know about the tool but know that forking from source code is not hard.

Scammers use Bitcoin source code to create their forks and their Bitcoin forks usually dead.

How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!!
https://forkdrop.io/how-many-bitcoin-forks-are-there