The Hash War - Burning Electricity

At this point it seems that ABC is the winner of the BCH Hash war. They are leading in hashing power with a 50% advantage in accumulated PoW. They also win the investors trust being valued about 5 times higher than BSV and they were recognised by many exchanges and other service providers as the successor of BCH, claiming their original name.

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However, both BCH and BSV lost a lot of market cap and were significantly devaluated compared to bitcoin.

The hash war is still ongoing and the BSV side is still hashing like crazy. I made a quick calculation to see how far both sides are away from profitable mining. For this I assumed optimal conditions. I compute only electricity cost using a price of 5 cent. I assume they have the most modern miners available with 100% uptime. There are no costs to obtain the hardware or depreciation.

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BCH has mined using 2400 ZH since the fork, costing roughly 3.100.000$ in the electricity bill. The mined coins have a market value of 2.640.000$. The miners are thus making a loss even in the most optimistic case. At the same time mining bitcoin would remain profitable where 2400 ZH would give you roughly 4.660.000$, a profit of 1.500.000$.

The BCH side is therefore mining slightly above the maximum and loosing the opportunity to use their hardware to mine profitable coins. Total loss is 2.000.000 $ or more.

The BSV miners have used 1600 ZH, costing 2.100.000 $ electricity. However they only mined coins worth 540.000$! We see that while BCH is already mining at the limit, BSV mining is not motivated at all by economics but just political. They are just burning electricity, about 1.500.000$ in 5 days.

Adding the lost opportunity to mine profitable BTC, the net damage is 2.500.000$ or more.

In the end both sides are loosing money and we will see how long they are willing to bleed until the hash rate of both chains normalises with respect to the price of the coins. Right now it is still a political battle. The war may already be over, but both sides are still fighting.

The losses may seem comparable, but the BCH side can lower their hashrate a little and become profitable. The BSV side cannot do that since their coins is worth so little. The reason they have not much bigger losses is because they are loosing the hashwar even tough they are massively overmining their coin.

I predict that BCH hashrate will slowly drop about 1/3. At that point their mining would be profitbale, BTC mining would be profitble and there would be only a slight opportunity cost for them to not mine BTC. This could be sustained for a long time without big losses. BSV would still not be able to get more hashes and eventually will need to give up.