Bitcoin (BTC) mining is a lucrative business. With the right hardware and cheap energy, you can make good money as an entrepreneur. According to data from Statista, sales of miners have increased by 1900% since 2013.

Miners distributed $260 million in 2013, in 2019 it was $5 billion in BTC. It is not for nothing that in recent years we see more and more computer power used to miners bitcoin.

Bitcoin mining

The increase in revenue is logical: the price of bitcoin is a lot higher than in 2013. A large part of the turnover comes from the block reward. At this moment the reward for finding a block is 12.5 BTC. In May this will go to 6.25 BTC.

We call this event the bitcoin halving. Every 210,000 blocks (~4 years) the bitcoin protocol halves the issuance of bitcoin. There have been two bitcoin halves and so far the turnover of miners is increasing almost every year.

Lucrative

Due to the recent price drops, some of the miners had to turn off their hardware. This means that there is more left for the remaining miners.

The loss of a number of parties can be lucrative for the entrepreneurs who are still profitable despite the current price of bitcoin (around $6,300).

The graph below shows the turnover in dollars. You can guess when BTC in dollars rose to great heights. After the halving in 2016 it suddenly went fast. The inudstry rose from $550 million in turnover to $3.19 billion in 2017.

Despite the sharp fall in 2018 after the record prices in 2017, sales also increased at that time. 2018 is so far the record year with $5.26 billion in BTC distributed among the miners.