The opportunity cost of farming
Somebody in a group chat told me a chain had got cheap enough that farming it was “basically free”. He meant the gas. He had checked the gas, found it under a cent, and stopped counting there.
That is the whole problem in one sentence, and I did the same thing for a year.
What the fee pieces already cover
I have written three things about direct spend. One on the fee floor, where moving something costs more than the thing is worth. One on the six column sheet you keep so you know what you actually paid. One on setting a gas budget across a set of wallets before you commit to any of it.
All of that counts money you can watch leave a wallet. It is worth counting and most people never do it.
This piece is about the two costs that never touch a chain. Neither shows up on an explorer, neither ever produces a transaction, and between them they are far larger than the fees.
I price everything per unit per month
I sell mobile proxy lines. Every line has a sheet behind it: about ten dollars a month for the SIM, roughly a dollar fifty a month in modem depreciation, a share of a hundred and fifty dollar powered hub that carries thirty ports, a share of a two hundred dollar machine. All in, a line costs me somewhere near eleven fifty a month.
I know that to the dollar because the alternative is selling below cost for a year and hearing about it from the bank balance.
Nobody does this for a wallet. There is no invoice, no monthly line item, no supplier chasing payment. So the running cost gets estimated from the only thing that generates a receipt, which is gas.
So I built the sheet properly. Six wallets, eighteen months, costed the way I would cost a proxy line.
Gas, per wallet per month
Across those six wallets over eighteen months, fees came to about a hundred and thirty dollars.
Divide it out: a dollar twenty per wallet per month.
Real money, and small. Small enough that if it were the only cost, the group chat would be right.
The money that has to sit still
A wallet that behaves like a person’s wallet has to hold something. Enough to bridge, enough to swap, enough that a position clears the fee floor and is worth taking at all.
Mine held around four hundred dollars each, and once I counted what was also parked inside protocols the real figure was closer to three thousand two hundred across the six.
That money can do nothing else while it is doing this. Drain a wallet in month two and it stops accruing whatever you funded it to accrue, so the capital is committed for the length of a season, and a season is a year or more before anybody finds out whether it mattered.
The honest price for that is what the money would have earned in the dullest alternative available to you. Not the best trade you can picture yourself having made. The boring one, the one that needs no skill and no attention.
I am not going to quote a rate. Rates move, they differ by country, and none of this is financial advice. But the shape needs a figure attached, so: four percent a year, purely illustrative.
Three thousand two hundred dollars at that illustrative rate is about a hundred and twenty eight dollars a year, or a hundred and ninety across the eighteen months.
Per wallet per month, one dollar seventy eight.
Already more than the gas.
The hours
Then the cost nobody puts on a sheet at all.
An ordinary week is reading a thread to work out whether something is worth doing, bridging, waiting on the bridge, confirming it landed, doing the interaction, then going back the next morning because you did not quite trust it. Multiply by however many wallets are in the rotation.
Two and a half hours a week is a low estimate for anybody genuinely keeping up. Over eighteen months that is roughly two hundred hours, or five working weeks.
Across six wallets, one point eight five hours per wallet per month.
Put your own figure on an hour. At twenty dollars, illustrative again, thirty seven dollars per wallet per month.
The finished sheet
So the running cost of one farming wallet, on my numbers:
- gas, one dollar twenty
- foregone return on parked capital, one dollar seventy eight, illustrative
- time, thirty seven dollars, illustrative
Forty dollars a month, and gas is three percent of it.
A proxy line costs me eleven fifty a month and invoices somebody at the end of it. A farming wallet costs me nearly four times that and invoices nobody.
That comparison is why I stopped arguing with myself about bridge fees.
Volume fails without any sybil argument
I have written separately about why large fleets get clustered and flagged. This gets to a similar place by a different road, and I want to walk it without touching detection at all.
Assume the filters are perfect and fair. Assume no honest user is ever wrongly clustered, and every wallet gets scored on its own merits by a process with no errors in it.
Volume still loses, because of what the marginal wallet does to the sheet.
Adding a wallet adds capital in a straight line: another four hundred dollars parked, identical to the last one. It adds time in nearly a straight line too, since some of the reading is shared across wallets but the clicking is shared by nothing, and the clicking is most of it.
So wallet number ten costs about what wallet number one costs. Forty dollars a month, on my numbers.
Expected allocation does not behave that way.
Where the return curve bends
Allocations tend to be banded. You cross a threshold, land in a tier, and doing three times as much inside that tier moves the outcome very little. The first wallet captures most of what a single participant can capture.
The tenth wallet is competing for your attention against nine others and getting roughly a ninth of it. Thin attention produces thin wallets. The qualifying behaviour is usually the deep part, and the deep part is the first thing to get dropped on a tired Sunday night.
Straight cost line, bending return line. They cross somewhere. For anybody running this around a job, they cross a good deal earlier than the forum threads suggest.
Small wallet counts are defensible on that arithmetic alone, before anybody mentions clustering.
What I run
Six for most of the period above. Three now, and I will not go past four.
Three suits me and I derived it from nothing more principled than that. It is the count where I can still do the deep version on each wallet before the whole thing turns into a queue of chores. My test is whether I would be embarrassed to say out loud what each wallet did last month. At three I can. At six I could not.
The hours are not all cost
Everything above is one sided, so here is the other side of it.
If you are learning, the time buys something real. My first six months taught me more about how these systems behave than any amount of reading would have: what an approval actually is, why a failed transaction charges you anyway, why a balance on screen is a different thing from money you can move. Some of that made me better at reasoning about infrastructure I do get paid for.
But learning front loads. It arrives early and thins out fast. The two hundredth identical interaction teaches nothing, and past that point you are working, so the hours should be priced as work.
Enjoying it is a real answer
Some people like this. They like watching a new protocol behave, they like the small ritual of it on a Sunday morning. That is a legitimate reason to spend an evening and I will not argue anybody out of it.
I only want it filed in the right place. If it is a hobby, the hours were going somewhere anyway and the sheet above does not apply to you. The test is one question, asked honestly: would you still do this if you knew for certain the allocation would be zero?
Yes makes it a hobby. No makes it an investment, and an investment where ninety percent of the input goes uncounted cannot be evaluated.
What I got wrong
I counted gas and called it accounting, then used the gas figure to defend the activity to myself. The fees were small, so the thing was cheap, so carrying on was obviously fine.
The specific error I can point at is adding four wallets inside a single month because I was already sitting at the computer anyway. The time felt committed, so the marginal wallet felt free. It was the most expensive line on the sheet and I had priced it at zero.
Where this argument is weak
I cannot prove the bending part. What I have is my own allocations across six wallets over a couple of seasons, which is one operator, a small sample, and no view of how any of it was scored on the other side.
Returns may be closer to linear than I think, and my three wallet position may be me rationalising the effort I felt like putting in.
The capital and the hours I am confident about, because those are subtraction and subtraction holds no opinions. The rest of how I cost this out is on the home page.
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