Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has estimated that the electricity that Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious co-founder of the leading cryptocurrency, paid to mine 1 million BTC would have been under $3,700 total.

Hoskinson shared three different scenarios estimating how much electricity it would have cost Nakamoto to mine 1 million Bitcoins between 2009-2010.

The Bitcoin creator mined their coins during a time of extremely low mining difficulty, almost non-existent competition and CPU mining.

The scenarios in the table show various plausible ways Satoshi might have mined the coins with different assumptions about the number of mining machines, wattage, duty cycle and electricity price.

Only one mining rig that uses 190 watts of electricity on average and operates 75% of the time over 485 days would be the most efficient and minimal setup. If Satoshi were just a single person mining with a decent consumer PC or server, this is what it might have looked like. In this case, the cost would be $191.

However, based on the Patoshi pattern, which was discovered by researcher Sergio Lerner based on the analysis of non-random nonce patterns in early Bitcoin blocks, a single entity (probably Satoshi) mined with a cluster of machines. This would be the most realistic setup that would bump up the cost to $575 in the U.S. and nearly $1,000 overseas.

If Satoshi needed more energy to stay competitive and keep up with growing mining difficulty, the cost would have risen up to the aforementioned $3,700.

As reported by U.Today, Nakamoto, whose real identity remains a mystery, is now considered to be one of the richest people in the world, recently surpassing Bill Gates. His estimated net worth is approaching $120 billion.

In other news, Ripple CTO David Schwartz recently revealed that he mined a total of 250 Bitcoins (BTC) when the cryptocurrency was trading at roughly $30.