Main map · Costs and limits
The whole bill, in one place.
Every cost of running this network: what miners burn, what disks hold, what node operators carry, and what builders pay to prove things. Each entry stands on its own, with its figure first, its method under it, and its uncertainty, source, and read date shown.
The ledger records load here, one block per cost, read from the site's dated cost dataset. If this line is still showing, the dataset has not been wired to this page yet, and no figure on this page should be quoted.
The one sentenceA cost without its method and its date is a rumor; every entry above carries both, or it does not appear.
The exact version
How each record in the ledger is built, and how to read one against another.
Each record names one cost and nothing else. The figure comes first because that is what a skeptic scans for; the method line under it says how the figure was produced, in one line, so the same figure can be produced again by anyone who doubts it. Where a figure is computed, the method states the inputs and the arithmetic in words. Where a figure is read from a source, the source and the date it was read stand in the record itself, not in a footnote somewhere else.
Some figures can only be estimated. Those records carry their uncertainty as a line of the record, beside the method, never as a smaller print disclaimer at the foot of the page. A range is printed as a range. A figure whose uncertainty is wider than the figure is still printed, because the honest width is part of what the network costs.
Concentration records state their counting method. A pool share, for example, is counted from the tags miners sign into the blocks they produce, over a stated window of blocks, the same reading the mining coverage on this site uses; a client share is counted from what nodes report, over its own stated window. Two records that count differently say so in their method lines, and this page does not average them into one number.
Costs that nobody can measure yet are not guessed into the ledger. They stay where this site keeps unsettled things, in the open questions register, until evidence exists that can carry a figure, a method, and a date.
Sources and the raw numbers
Every record in the ledger carries its own source and the date that source was read; there is no separate source list for this page, because a figure and its source travel together or not at all. The dataset itself is published as one file, data/costs.json, in the record format the round 3 build fixed: name, figure or range, unit, method in one line, uncertainty in one line, source, read date. If a figure here and a figure elsewhere on the site disagree, trust the one with the later read date, and tell us through Suggest a change.