How Much is 2b2t Worth? 

BEFORE YOU COMMENT - It's likely your question is already answered here: Q: Dude, your estimate is really low. A: Yes, it's supposed to be low. The whole intention was to simply get an absolute minimum amount of what 2b2t is estimated to be worth. Q: You valued 2b2t incorrectly. Why did you ADD the liabilities to the value? Wouldn't you normally subtract them? A: There is no set way to value a company. Everyone does it differently because in the end, if the server was to be sold, it would be up to both parties to agree on a final price. In this case, I decided to add the liabilities with the idea that you would be also be paying for the investment made into the company. Plus, even if I ended up subtracting those liabilities, it would barely make any change to the final estimated value. Read the disclaimer at 0:57. Q: The backup server is likely not a physical machine that Hause owns. A: I got a lot a DMs about this after I released the video with some evidence to prove that the map backup is likely stored on a cloud server. This actually makes more sense as building and co-locating a backup server wouldn't make as much financial or practical sense. Certainly an oversight by me on that one. Q: 2b2t is worthless. A: It's not. Change my mind.

"Welcome back to the oldest anarchy server in Minecraft, which I now own" -FitMC

I genuinely wonder how hause is doing. They've been extremely silent, in fact we don't even know if Hause is a real person anymore and not just a group. Its so mysterious

I never realized how much money just that skip queue thing can make that’s insane

when you’re valuing an asset, the expenses (server upkeep costs) should be subtracted from the final value, not added

"Yeah I have a millionaire salary." 'Wow! Are you an astronaut? The president? A CEO?' "Nah bro I just host a Minecraft server."

My guess is that the backup server wouldn't be an physical server, rather an enterprise cloud service like Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3. It simply doesn't make sense to purchase and manage a bare metal server machine only for backups (as keeping backups does not require any compute power).

2 cents and a snickers bar

Prolly like 8 dollars

I'll be honest I was expecting the map to be calculated with NFT prices lmao

I feel it'd lose a lot if not all of its value if it's sold because the Admin would probably be more active than Hause is and it would kill the server.

That RuneScape music was totally unexpected, what a rush of nostalgia from 2011.

It would be interesting to see a professional firm make an audit on the server.

In conclusion it's worth: 10+ years worth of thousands of players' creations, destruction, friendships, rivalries, and history. Priceless.

I'd wouldn't say the server is worthless, but priceless. The rich history and impact on minecraft's culture is beyond the maintenance costs

I sure hope Hause doesn’t do anything drastic with the server

Great video highlighting the raw asset value, monthly revenues & expenses, etc. $1.6mm does seem very much like a lowball valuation, but for reasons different than you highlight. What you are paying if you were to buy the server are the raw assets (server hardware, domain name) and all the data on them - all the bits and bytes that make up 2b2t. The first stab at valuation is getting at what's called "book value", or the exact cost it would take to buy this hardware. As you point out, though, this is very much understated since someone replicating the exact hardware setup of 2b2t still doesn't own a server that IS 2b2t; financially this matters because 2b2t essentially has a competitive advantage (network effect) that makes that specific set of colocated hardware more valuable than just the raw off-the-shelf cost to replicate the set up, and this brings us to the next step of the valuation - the earnings power. As you point out, Hause is (conservatively) raking in around $1.1 million operating profit (i.e. pre-tax) annually. Let's additionally throw on a 33% tax rate and say it boils down to $737k after-tax profit each year. Here is where your analysis goes wrong - you add the $1.1mm pre-tax profit to your estimated auction value for the "art" of the 2b2t map and say the server is worth around $1.6mm. However, you are neglecting that the owner is raking in $1.1mm pre-tax profit EVERY YEAR. You're buying the server for not just one year but forever. So what is that $1.1mm pre-tax ($737k post-tax) profit worth TODAY assuming no growth (nor any decline)? That brings one to the concept of a "discount rate", which is a means of translating future cash flows into a present value. Again, assuming no growth nor any decline in the profit of the server (i.e. it will generate $1.1mm pre-tax profit // $737k post-tax profit each year, forever) then there are a range of values based on what this "discount rate" is. This is where investing becomes more art than science. Some will say to use the weighted average cost of capital of a business, but 2b2t has no real cost of capital since it presumably can be operated without any debt, thus the only cost of capital is the required rate of return of the purchaser. If I want to earn a steady 10% on the money I shell out for this $737k after-tax profit stream, the value (based on the formula for a perpetuity, meaning a cash flow stream that is constant forever is): = $737,000 / 10% = $7.37 million If there is conceivably some level of growth in the priority queue subscribers (and thus in top line growth) that more than offsets growth in the cost structure then this flows to the bottom line (profit) and one would adjust the valuation for some assumed base level of growth. Look up "growing perpetuity" or "2 step dividend discount" or "Gordon Growth Model" if interested further. And you could optionally throw on the auction value of the 'art' aspect of the server on top of this, so long as the terms of auctioning the "art" of the server's map do not transfer any ownership rights to the earnings stream of the business. Tbh you could probably get a lot more than $500k at auction if someone set up some kind of vehicle like a DAO and tokenized the "art" of the server map with a crowdsourced auction, like Constitution DAO, and let the masses of 2b2t fans all pitch in a small amount for partial symbolic ownership without any true ownership, but I think this is a very scummy thing to do and hope it never happens. Source: professional investor

I doubt Hause would ever let go of this server, I know I wouldn't. I think the server would count as art not only because of the map, but for events that happened on the server, milestones achieved, and the culture.

The server hosting costs are not assets, they're liabilities. If you bought 2b2t that would be your expense to pay, you wouldn't acquire $7200/yr worth of anything.

I love the Ori music you used! A well deserved like!

12 dollars, take it or leave it.

The fact that there's the cent sumbol in his glasses, but the final estimate is 1.6M

Hausemaster is such a good owner/group ngl. Considering it's a server full of exploit abusing hackers hes done a very good job at keeping information private as well as keeping the server running.

After the 1.19 update - "it's worthless" seems to be the correct answer.

I sure hope no bad changes happen!

“That means Hausmaster makes at least $1.1 Million per year!” Damn, what am I doing not making my own anarchy server…

It's sad to think that 2b is so valuable, we might never see an entire public world download, even decades from now

I've never played minecraft in my entire life, but this stuff is so interesting to me.. great videos

The possibility that Hause is making 7 figures over a Minecraft server is crazy

It seems like HauseMaster has made his best investment in his life, keeping 2b2t alive for all those years, the fact that he probably could made $100.000 USD a month is just mind blown to me, but also makes sense since he got huge bills monthly for the server to even run.

Man, I had no idea THAT MANY people had priority queue. I thought it was a couple hundred at most. Crazy how popular this one server is.

The content created with it is probably insanely worthy added together

thank you for introducing these good songs to me! though it would be nicer if you put the songs in the description so I know there's actually a song list in the video

I completely agree with your estimates, it's crazy how profitable minecraft still is. Back in the day even smaller servers were raking in this amount though, so I would really assume hause is pulling in a few million a year before development expenses The server has to be worth at least 5 million, and for all we know it could've been sold already and hause is another person behind the same accounts

Well in August of 2023 it's probably worth zero to none now that it's been reset and updated

$1.6M actually makes sense with that breakdown and could be a low estimate. There is a compromise cause when you purchase a business, you don't want it to take long to turn a profit. Personally, considering that map alone being a art piece and also the revenue it can generate. I would not let it go unless I could sell off comfortably and not feel like I am losing much of my current lifestyle. This is an interesting thought. It's not just about an offer that would sound appealing, but it's also who's buying it and I would want to know what their plan is to run the server. I would draw up a contract with a provisionary/probationary period where I can terminate the contract and sell of the server if it's being mismanaged. I guess I'd transfer over the existing staff. I would want to remain on board as a consultant on what ideas should made until I feel comfortable with the new owner.

id say the actual physical server is worth 10-100k USD. But the stories, interactions, and history is priceless.

I think, even though the server earns Hause 1mil $, investors still shouldn't buy it, since people could stop playing 2b2t knowing that Hause is not the owner anymore, everyone would remember the situation with iTristain, therefore, less people would buy prio, therefore, the price paid for the server would be less.

6:54 Reddit's Place was a project in 2017 where people could change the color of one pixel every 5-20 minutes. The resulting artwork is a bit like a Minecraft map. Specifically blocks placed to put on an in-game map like the 2B2T Times newspaper. Everyone can place blocks and change the map and together they turned it into what it is now.

update following the '23 downfall: probably 10 cents if lucky

Company valuation when it comes to “purchasing” a company is much different overall, but this definitely a good starting point of the type of money that 2b2t is raking in. Crazy stuff!

i think estimating priority queue subscribers from a youtube poll grossly overestimated the actual amount of people who pay for it but in fairness i dont even know how you could try to estimate it another way accurately nonetheless great video :D

I would have never guessed 2b2t was worth so much! Also this video was very high quality I subscribed! (771k subscriber)

Nice of you using music from Ori and the will of the wisps, that (beautiful) game (with *great* music) deserves more attention!

"I would even put this map into the classification of an art piece" I can't wait to see the 2b2t map nft.....

A good starting point for valuation of a business is annual gross revenue times two. I agree with your opinion that the value of the map requires a kicker. Assuming 5k paying for priority queue and at least 600k for the map that would put my starting valuation at around $3 million US minimum. I loved the shoutout to FitMC.

and now it's worth nothing.

You can probably actually double the server cost storage wise, since they did do a whole other server in a newer version of Minecraft with a clone of the 2b2t server

I clicked before I even got the notif. Hell yeah.

I would really up the amount on that RAM tbh. 64 gigs I would say is low

The networking fees for that is at least an another million a year. Moving ~10 terabytes to an external location generally costs around $100. There's also the need for load balancing etc. misc servers, which are probably another $5K a month.

Nothing. It is worth nothing now.

3:10 This is one of the many points you might've made an error. For all we know the cold storage could be put onto a cloud provider solution such as AWS S3 buckets, decreasing the cost of cold storage to pennies.

“You’re really rich! What do you do for a living?” “Oldest Anarchy Server in Minecraft”

update: nothing. holy shit the update sucked.

because that 4% isn't amplified by several factors from people trolling/misclicking

this entire video feels like sal just trying to convince us 2b2t is more then just a couple cents

The maintenance would be EXPENSIVE!

I work as an it engineer and I can tell you from personal experience that it’s rather a raid 5,6,10 or 50 raid 1 is mostly used in a pc not a server rig

5:52 thanks for that nostalgia with use of Medieval II.

Your methodology is correct minus one particular aspect. When I sold my business it was: (assets + (annual revenue - expenses)) × 3 = company valuation. And another thing which is hard to be tangible, but the marketing is also considered an asset. Past and current. This is why as a business owner I would have been thrilled for other people talking about my business for free it's free advertising. That advertisement and name recognition especially over so many years has a value. but based off of your numbers alone it would be valued at just shy of $4.7 mil USD. The reason why you multiply it by 3 is because it is a business that is in the black with hard assets producing revenue. You would not sell something that is constantly generating you $1 mil a year for $1 mil lol, that's just silly. And the multiplication by three is a low-ball estimate. For something with this much name recognition you could possibly sell it for 10 or 20 times this valuation. But that's why I said valuation, not how much it would cost, that is up to the buyer.

priority queue's possible revenue is something i never thought of until now, kinda insane how much hausemaster can profit out of this, i mean it will be kinda nice to know his revenue for scientific purposes

Bruh you could live off that priority queue revenue, not even live you could fuckin' *thrive* , that's insane.

6:20 The Runescape Music really made me question if I had my client up or not..

Nonetheless, it wouldn't just be RAID 1 either as suggested in the video. It's either RAID 10 or a ZFS pool with a raidz vdev. Hopefully not using hardware RAID cards and risky RAID 5 or 6. Although I'm not an expert on this. In terms of raidz, it would benefit on reads anyway, which I suspect the server does more of than writing (i.e. loading chunks when players wonder). For backups to the aforementioned backup server, I have no idea what's being done. ZFS snapshots and ZFS send to the backup server? The only problem with Minecraft (and Paper, by extension) is that the only way to guarantee a perfect backup is to stop the server process first: I do know this from experience and chatting with Paper devs. With a world size at 13TiB, it would have to be differential or incremental backups if not using ZFS snapshotting. In my opinion, if Hause is going to do online backups (meaning not stopping the server temporarily to take a snapshot), then he can pass 'save-off' to the Paper server console, take a ZFS snapshot of the dataset containing the server directory, and then send 'save-on' to the Paper server console afterwards. Then take the snapshot data and do whatever is needed with it (e.g. archive or ZFS send to other server) then delete older snapshots. Online backups of Minecraft servers currently do NOT guarantee that data isn't changed. Save-off and save-on only affect chunk saving, not player data or plugin data, as far as I'm aware. As someone else mentioned, other than for pure redundancy, having a backup server on-site for the main server makes no sense. However, backups to a cloud service for data of this magnitude gets pricey very quickly.

The server costs need to be adjusted for the time he bought it, recently all pc parts are like 50-70% more expensive giving you an inflated value for the server costs.

I think the sale price of 2b2t will ultimately depend on the sellout price of the dev(s) behind it, which I agree is well above $1mil. But it mainly depends on the passion of whoever is behind it, relative to the income, compared to them doing something else for more money.

Just as an FYI as a server nerd, It's more than likely that hausemaster would be using a multiple CPU setup for something like this, so possible double the amount of CPUs and also a compatible motherboard would be most likely even more expensive especially with DDR5. also 64gb of DDR5 is a lowball, I would assume he's using at least 128, it depends on what the motherboard supports. My friend runs a similar raid setup for his small 8 person server lmao

Not sure i would assume everyone that voted yes on the poll actually pays for priority queue. Loads of people probably just voted yes at random, to inflate the numbers or just to see the results tbh

FitMC: "*I'll take your entire stock!*"

I find flaw in what you define as "value" - most of what you described, other than the revenue from the monthly queue skipping are costs. In broad strokes, I'd take the annual income Hause makes from queue skipping, subtract the costs (of which I think 20k a year for development time to be an underestimate knowing the daily rates of software engineers) and times it by five to get the valuation of 2b2t as a "business" and the map, which is probably only of value if the server was taken down and the map was provided as a NFT (thus killing the revenue) as a "tangible asset" along side the hardware he owns. In short, any value less than 5 million is likely to be an understatement based on the assumption that the doubling of your poll response represents the monthly payers - but I wouldn't be surprised if it was quadruple that and a value of 10 million+

took me a minute to notice the ori music starting 1:00, nice

i think 500k is a little on the high side in my opinion mainly because of the factor of the person who buys the server will see is as an investment meaning to recoup the cost they will even increase revenue streams by upping the queue or put in microtransactions which would affect the playerbase revolting and not playing.

Question is if it's a physical server or a cloud service like google cloud or aws, if it's cloud, the price is gonna be different (more expensive but also more convenient)

I honestly did not expect Hause to be making 1 mil a year on solely priority queue

Awesome video Sal.

hi, im a huge fanof ur vids, keep up the good work

1.6 million value seems like a serious low ball. If he's bringing 1.1million in revenue each year then in 1 and 1/2 years it pays its self off. In reality if a company wanted to buy 2b2t they would be more likely to pay 5 million given how long itwouldtake for it to pay that back.

I can give abit of insider input. I worked for Ascension which is one of the largest WoW private servers. I worked there for about 3 years until last month. In 2021 Ascension generated over $2.6 million in revenue just from our PayPal option. It doesn't matter how "cheap" or "expensive" some server hardware is. Large game servers can make 7 figures a year. Nobody is going to sell that for anything under millions of dollars. A business making over a million a year is worth WAY more than just $1.6 million.

I was shook when around 4:50 gw2 ost starter playing ngl

Sal seemed offended by the poll saying it is worthless

I like how 50% of people said it's worthless. Totally based

Nothing now

It might be time to revisit this.

I find it hard to believe that such a big server can run on just a consumer-grade CPU (albeit a high-grade one) and reasonably specced gaming rig. So if that's true, it's pretty remarkable the server even still works.

A villager: 3 wheat is the best i can do

i feel like, for the yearly revenue, it would have made more sense to focus on the percentages from that poll. since 4% of people said that they did pay for a priority queue subscription, that would then theoretically mean that around 4% of 2b2t players pay for it. then, all that would have to be done is find out how many players are on the server monthly, find 4% of that, and then multiply it by 20, since each individual person is paying $20. that seems more like a reasonable estimate than saying that only ~4654 players pay for priority queue monthly, in my opinion.

glad to listen ori music in Salc1 channel

Early on 4chan anons largely defined the atmosphere and culture of this server. Whatever 2b2t is worth it's worth it because of those anons and because hausemaster kept the server going without banning anyone.

It's priceless, the map alone is a relic.

Dammm this server is still around that’s crazy I remember being a little one hearing and playing on 2b2t

it's worthless now that the server reset

I’d say 2b2t is priceless. It is worth too much that you can’t give it a value

Sal, I absolutely respect your work and what you did here. I don’t think that this makes a big difference anyways, but please inform yourself a bit more about servers before estimating the value of such a server. As said: I don’t think it makes much of a difference after all 😅. This shouldn’t be an insult but just the small note that those numbers are inaccurate.

As the name says, 2billion 2trillion

I love that you used the fungal wastes OST from Hollow Knight :)

Regarding the "lol that's so slow" at 3:03 : 15k drives are pitifully slow when compared to even regular ssds, let alone nvme. We're now at the price point that enterprise read intensive SSDs are about the same cost of 15k drives so there's almost no reason not to get ssds now when building a server if you're not running storage of a SAN. Also no one is going to dedicate you a 10gb circuit, and certainly the 2b2t server doesn't need it, and you definitely won't be paying just $600 for that. You'd be sharing a multi gig circuit plus to fit a pc case and other hardware you'd be looking at renting a quarter to a half rack.

i think the hardware would cost more than that. 64 gigs of memory seems kinda low for a huge server. and 64 tb of storage also seems low. but other then that all the prices seem alright

I went to school for server and computer hardware and can confirm that 12k is a good estimate for a minimum cost for hardware although I’d argue that number could easily double based on where, when and how he set up those servers and how much his costs are for minecraft specific things that I don’t have much knowledge on

I dont know if anyone already mention it since the video is 6mo old, but u forgot one of the most important thing that is the community, because before the server 2b2t is essentialy a community, and communitiies are worth a lot because they generate data, and that data is worth money. For u to have an example, discord in paper is a failed business but we know better, discord is actually one of the most valluable social media network in the entire world, and its not because of nitro since nitro doesnt even make enough money to keep the servers running, but because its one of the biggest communities in the world and that community generates data that can be sould to other companies. 2b2t can actually be worth a lot more thanks to the fat that ir doesnt have restrictions and the data u harvest is completely unfiltered and that is the most rare thing u can find in the internet. Liked the video, if u do another one similar to this one hope u remember this fact