What does a PCOC cost at scale?

A PCOC is a self-issued identifier backed by a resource commitment. You make it yourself, with your own machine's work, held for a stretch of time that a public clock closes. The producer pays no one; the cost stays with the producer. But that work has a real price if you rent the hardware, and that price is paid again for every identifier made.

PCOC limits how fast identifiers can be made, so we state its cost as a rate: what it costs per identifier to produce at a pace that finishes a campaign inside 30 days.

Our current estimate, per identifier at a 30-day campaign rate, on rented two-channel desktop-class servers at monthly rates:

• An honest producer: about US$0.14 per identifier (up to $0.19 at short-term hourly rates).
• The cheapest packing we have measured: about US$0.095 per identifier, roughly US$95,000 per million. A million in 30 days means about 1,440 machines running at once.

That second figure is a ceiling on what a determined producer of many identifiers pays on these hosts, not a floor. On paper, larger servers with many memory channels might bring it down to around US$0.06, but our own measurements suggest real servers would land above that. We haven't measured them. GPUs and other fast memory might go lower still, and we haven't been able to put a number on them. The figures also assume the default floor; a more lenient service would accept cheaper packing.

How we got there. We measured how fast hikes run when several share one machine. Memory bandwidth, not cores or memory size, sets the limit. We priced that machine from public rental lists, split its bill across the hikes it can carry, and added the cost of the hikes that fall below the gate's floor. Electricity is a small part of it. Buying machines instead of renting doesn't make the work free: the purchase is capital spent on every identifier, amortised over the machine's life, plus power and hosting. Spreading that cost over years only makes identifiers cheaper if you make them slowly. To make many within a month, you either rent, or buy the whole fleet up front and hope to resell it. We haven't costed that yet, because we found no sourced purchase price.

What we don't know yet. These figures come from measurements of the previous version of the hike, carried forward by an assumption we invite anyone to test. If that assumption fails, every figure moves.

This is an open question, not a claim. Every figure is sourced or marked as an assumption in the full analysis. If you think one is wrong, tell us.

Why does sign-in ask for this? Because each identifier costs its maker real work, so each of thousands needs its own work, and real money if the hardware is rented. It's a commitment of your own resources, not a fee.