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Right now in this moment Thu 11 July 2019 22:08 UK time
That's a sizeable number. Almost as big a fraud comitted by a single bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_scandal
It would be easy to calculate the current price of Antminer, current difficulty, ignore the difficulty adjustment and come with some number.
But in reality, there were many different hardware, difficulty was changing and as a result I'm rather unsure - how much money in terms of HARDWARE and ELECTRICITY was invested into Bitcoin?
Feel free to make reasonable assumptions, such as 10¢ per kWh.
Relevant resources:
- Historical difficulty: https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Difficulty_in_Mining
- Mining devices: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
- Time to rewrite the blockchain: https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1136976776524128257
More explanation:
https://hackernoon.com/the-future-of-machine-learning-hardware-c872a0448be8
- 2009 CPU - no hardware investment - just electricity
- 2010 GPU - some hardware investment
- 2011 GPU and FPGA - hardware investment
- 2012...
Given all the data, it should be possible to come to some reasonable estimate.
(not including the cost of real estate to house mining farms and 1000s of engineering hours and constant worldwide media attention)
PS. I love everything about Bitcoin, specifically math, cryptography, economy, and physics - conversion of energy ⚡️⚡️⚡️
I'd like to comment for others that, even though the question is very broadly and unlikely to produce good results, it looks within the rules of "events that are applicable and relevant to the Bitcoin network" – Tiago Loriato Simões – 2019-07-12T03:38:22.303
@TiagoLoriatoSimões there are questions that are off-topic, despite broadly falling under that criteria. For example, a question about a centralized Bitcoin business' customer service policy would certainly be relevant to some subset of Bitcoin users, but it would still be off-topic as a customer-service question. – chytrik – 2019-07-12T22:50:11.850