If serious compute arrived

Pearl's difficulty is decided by how much hardware is pointed at it, and its issuance is not. So the cost of producing a coin is a question about scale: pick a card, a power price and a slice of the world's AI datacenter capacity, and the rest follows.

The variables

Four inputs decide every number below. The capacity pool is the one people argue about most, so it carries its sources.

What the operator pays per kWh, all-in.
Straight-line, charged in full to mining.

Energy and value, both measured against Bitcoin

Two ways of comparing the networks, on one scale. The upper line is the power Pearl would draw as a share of Bitcoin's; the lower is what Pearl would have to be worth, as a share of Bitcoin's fully diluted value, for that hardware to cover its electricity. Both rise together with the compute pointed at the chain, so the gap between them is constant — and that gap is the whole point: Pearl reaches Bitcoin's energy long before it reaches Bitcoin's value.

Difficulty and unit cost, by share of AI datacenter capacity

Each row dedicates that share of the capacity pool to Pearl and carries it all the way through: cards, hashrate, difficulty, and what a coin then costs to make. The row nearest where the network actually is today is marked, and so is the row where Pearl would draw as much power as Bitcoin.

How this is computed

Four steps from watts to a unit cost, each exact given the one before it.

The chain of reasoning

Capacity → cards. A card's wall draw is its board power times PUE. A miner runs flat out, so capacity pointed at Pearl is drawn continuously — which is why the denominator is datacenter capacity rather than average consumption. Mixing those two is a factor of about four, and it is the easiest mistake to make on this page.
Cards → hashrate. Multiply. The per-card throughput is the weakest input on this site: published figures disagree by up to 2×, so every number in the table inherits that spread.
Hashrate → difficulty. difficulty = hashrate × 194 s / K, the same relation the rest of the site uses, inverted. K is fitted from 164 history points at σ/μ = 10.8%.
Difficulty → cost. This is the part worth sitting with. Emission depends on height alone — not on hashrate, not on difficulty — so a network ten times the size mints exactly the same number of coins per day and divides them among ten times the hardware. Unit cost therefore rises in direct proportion to the compute pointed at the chain. Every other crypto network works this way too; it is simply much easier to see when you can move the input.
What this is not. A forecast. Nothing here says compute will arrive, and the table says nothing about whether a rational operator would bring it — that question lives on the production page, and at most of these scales the answer is no. This is the arithmetic of "if", not a prediction of "when". Bitcoin's draw is computed by the same frontier-hardware method as Pearl's: observed network hashrate divided by the most efficient machine currently sold, which is a floor rather than a census. Capacity figures are a researched assumption with citations and a 10–96 GW range.

Where to next

Related pages that answer the questions this one raises.

What a PRL costs to make today→ The same maths against Bitcoin→ Difficulty so far→ Every input, sourced→