Bitcoin Miners’ Revenue Surges 50% as Difficulty Drops
Coinspeaker
Bitcoin Miners’ Revenue Surges 50% as Difficulty Drops
Bitcoin miners’ revenue has seen a rise following the network’s biggest difficulty drop yet. Blockchain.com figures indicate that daily miner revenues have increased by over 50%.
The exodus of Bitcoin miners from China has resulted in a never-seen-before “interesting dynamic”. The recent crackdown on mining by Chinese authorities has resulted in half of the network’s hashing power going offline. It is still uncertain when the offline miners will be able to resume mining. Conversely, miners still online have experienced an unexpected increase in revenue as their competition disappeared seemingly abruptly. In fact, profitably is now back to levels experienced when BTC/USD traded at $55,000–$60,000.
These changes are clear to see when we analyze data from recent weeks. On July 2, the day before the difficulty adjustment, daily mining revenue was around $20.7M. By July 6 it had reached $31.9M.
Analytics firm Glassnode attributes this to a “very interesting dynamic”.
“We have a very interesting dynamic where approximately 50% of the hash power is currently offline and incurring a great number of costs due to logistics and just simply not hashing, having hardware that’s not currently working, and the other 50% has essentially seen half their competition drop off the network […] Whilst the protocol’s now issuing the same number of coins as it regularly does, having difficulty wound down, we’re now in a situation where half the network has doubled their income and the other half of the network is essentially producing nothing.”
The results are not limited to mining revenue. Glassnode reveals that average block times have peaked over the past few days rivaled only by levels during Bitcoin’s infancy around 2009-2010.
The numbers also reveal that because of relocation costs, some miners have resorted to spending treasuries as they are unable to participate in mining to earn their usual block rewards and fees. Other miners, ignoring the price plunge, are holding on to more bitcoin per block versus what they are spending.