‘Survival games’ as Bitcoin hash price skirts near all-time low

Bitcoin’s hash price, a crucial metric measuring miner revenue on a per terahash basis, is now near its lowest level ever recorded.

Data from Luxor Technology’s Hashrate Index shows Bitcoin’s hash price fell nearly 52% to $0.0459 per terahash second on June 24 after notching a two-month high of $0.095 on June 8.

It was inching toward its record-low of $0.0447 set on May 1 but has bounced back to $0.0479 over the last few hours.

In a June 23 X post, Adam Ortolf, a developer at Bitcoin mining firm Upstream Data said “survival games” have now kicked in for Bitcoin miners.

“So far this difficulty epoch it looks like #bitcoin hashpower has fallen off a cliff,” said Ortolf, who believes miners are “enduring serious pain” with the hash price hovering around $0.05 TH/s.

Fortunately, most Bitcoin mining machines remain profitable under current conditions, according to Mitchell Askew, head analyst at Blockware Solutions.

Hash price is largely determined by the Bitcoin price, miner rewards and mining difficulty — and all three of those metrics have plummeted in recent weeks.

Bitcoin’s price is down 6.8% over the last week to $60,590 — with market sentiment falling on news of Mt. Gox’s plans to sell $8.6 billion worth of Bitcoin to creditors and outflows from United States spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds over the last two weeks.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin miner rewards have been impacted by the fourth Bitcoin halving since April 20, which sliced the block subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC — worth $188,800 at current prices.

The network mining difficulty — the degree of difficulty to mine a block — is also down 5% to 83.68 trillion hashes after notching a record-high on April 25.

A large Bitcoin sell-off has been coming from miners too.

Bitcoin miner reserves plummeted to 1.90 million Bitcoin on June 19, the lowest level in Bitcoin terms in over 14 years.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-miners-survival-mode-hash-rate-approaches-all-time-low