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0 CommentsBitcoin hashrate triples since June 28 as miners are coming back online after China’s crackdown while surging Bitcoin price makes the mining business wildly profitable.
Bitcoin topped $50,000 on Monday, benefiting from simultaneous supply chain shortages and a crackdown from Chinese regulators – putting Bitcoin mining on par with profits near the coin’s April all-time-high.
The Bitcoin hashrate – the amount of computing power in the network – has now topped 150 Exahashes (EH = quintillion hashes) per second, according to data from analytics provider CryptoQuant. On Aug. 24, the metrics provider reported a hashrate of 152 EH/s which has tripled since it bottomed out this year on June 28 at 52 EH/s.
As Bitcoin’s price recovered in mid-July, less intense competition meant higher profitability for remaining participants. At its current price, profits from mining Bitcoin are close to their all-time highs, as shows the hashprice index, an indicator created and tracked by the crypto mining analytics company Luxor Technologies.
“I can’t help but think that we’re going to look back on these days as wildly profitable for miners. We definitely are in a golden age of crypto mining,” said Gerson Martinez, a former derivatives trader and market maker for Morgan Stanley. Now, he owns Bitcoin and also mines it through a retail-focused firm called Compass Mining.
The recovery of the BTC hashrate also means that the network is much more secure and harder to attack.
The average Bitcoin hashrate hit an all-time high of 197.6 EH/s on May 13, according to Bitinfocharts. Over the six weeks following, it slumped by more than 65%, as mining rigs across China were powered down for the “great miner migration.”
The metric is now approaching early June levels and, if the trend continues, could hit a new all-time high within the next couple of months.
As recently reported, U.S. mining firm Riot Blockchain announced record revenue for BTC mining during the second quarter.
