Original | Odaily Odaily( @OdailyChina )
Author: Golem ( @web3_golem )
At 8 am today, the highly anticipated Fractal mainnet was finally launched. Fractal uses a unique mining mechanism called "Cadence Mining", which means that for every 3 blocks mined, two blocks will be mined without permission, and the other block will be merged. This mechanism has spawned many Fractal ecological mining projects, and also stimulated the enthusiasm of users to rent computing power to participate in mining.
Therefore, due to the conflict of interest, the mainnet mining output and FB price have become the focus of the community. Although the FB OTC price has risen to around 19 u, many community members still expressed that they may lose all their money if they rent computing power to participate in the first mine.
Is this really the case? Is ordinary users’ participation in Fractal’s first mine a prelude to “making money” or “cutting losses”? Odaily Odaily will briefly analyze the output and income of Fractal mining in this article, hoping to provide a reference for readers.
Mining cost-benefit estimation
According to data from the Fractal block browser, the current Fractal merged mining computing power is about 90 EH/s, and the permission-free mining computing power is 10,000 PH/s (1 EH/s = 1,000 PH/s).
It is known that the current monthly leasing price of 1 PH/s computing power in the market is between 3000-5000 USDT. Even if calculated at the lowest leasing cost, at the price of FB 19 USDT, the daily output reaches 5.26 FB to achieve a break-even.
The more common mining output calculation method in the community is as follows:
Based on an average block time of 30 seconds and two-thirds of the output being license-free mining, about 72,000 FB are produced daily, of which about 48,000 are obtained through license-free mining. Therefore, 1 PH/s of computing power can obtain about 4.8 FB per day. Based on the FB over-the-counter price of 19 USDT, the miner's daily income is about 91.2 USDT.
If estimated in this way, leasing computing power to mine FB will not only not make money, but as the network's permissionless mining computing power increases, the FB rewards allocated to each 1 PH/s will continue to decrease, and the losses will expand.
Relative dynamic calculation method:
The above calculation method is basically based on the continuous increase in computing power and the unchanged daily output. However, the fact is that although Fractal's official preset average block time is 30 seconds and the daily output is approximately 72,000 FB, the current average block speed of the network is significantly faster than expected.
As shown in the figure below, 2,500 blocks were mined within 10 hours of the launch of the Fractal mainnet, producing more than 62,500 FBs. This means that as the computing power increases, the mining speed of blocks is also accelerating. The actual daily output will exceed the previously estimated 72,000 FBs.
Therefore, the average time for the actual block generation during the first mining period of the Fractal mainnet is about 10 to 15 seconds, which means that the output of FB today may be between 140,000 and 210,000. Even if the most conservative estimate of 140,000 FB output is used, two-thirds of which are mined without permission, that is, 93,000 FB, and 1 PH/s of computing power can obtain about 10.3 FB today. According to the FB over-the-counter price of 19 USDT, the daily income of miners is about 195.7 USDT.
If estimated in this way, as long as the FB price remains above 10 USDT, players who rent computing power to mine the first FB mine can still make a profit.
However, this calculation method is only relatively dynamic. Changes in the network's computing power, daily output, and FB prices will affect mining output and revenue. Ultimately, whether Fractal mining is worth participating in for a long time will need to be re-evaluated after the network runs stably.
Fractal is still full of challenges
In addition to the widespread discussion about mining revenue surrounding the launch of the Fractal mainnet today, there are still some doubts about its network.
The founder of mempool posted on the X platform that Fractal Bitcoin seems to be a "clone" of Bitcoin Core v2 4.0.1, and its pre-mined tokens account for 50% of the fully diluted supply of Fractal Bitcoin. Miners will need two full years (a Fractal Bitcoin halving interval) to earn half of the rewards the founders received on the first day. At the same time, Fractal Bitcoin has many meaningless technical terms that only exist in the white paper, so in his opinion, it is just another shitfork (of Bitcoin).
There were also node problems and long periods of no block production in network operation, but the team responded quickly, fixing node behavior in a timely manner and providing a new node version quickly.
At the same time, according to the OTC price of 19 USDT, the current market value of FB is close to 4 billion US dollars. Although FB can be transferred through the Fractal mainnet, there is currently no DEC/CEX listing FB tokens, and users' trading behavior still relies on OTC. The low transaction efficiency and opacity also cast a layer of uncertainty on the future price trend of FB.
