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Bitcoin Miners Still Profitable, Bitmain Strategy Shuffle, & Monero Moves to CPU Mining

Welcome to the first edition of what will be a regular newsletter published by the MinerUpdate editorial team. The Miner Movements newsletter will cover the latest developments in the mining world while also summarizing the most relevant mining content published by MinerUpdate and other media outlets.

The Devil is in the Data -

Pool Rankings

Poolin, BTC.com, and F2Pool have been the dominant Bitcoin mining pools of 2019. According to data from BTC.com, these three Bitcoin mining pools have mined the largest share of Bitcoin blocks over the past three days, collectively accounting for over 46% of the Bitcoin hash rate.

Hash Rate & Difficulty

Data from Bitinfocharts.com currently estimates the Bitcoin hash rate to be 90.7 EH/s with the seven-day moving average over the past year illustrated above. BTC.com is currently estimating that the mining difficulty level will increase by 1.89% at the next adjustment. Since the past adjustment, the average block time has been 9 minutes.

Bitcoin Price

Bitcoin price depreciated 5.39% during trading last week. At the time of writing, bitcoin price is trading at $6,910. Despite the price declines, recent research from both CoinShares and our Miner Insight reports suggests the majority of Bitcoin miners are still profitable.

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Miner Insights -

Bitmain Unveils New Strategies at Chengdu Event - In an event exclusive to Bitmain customers, the Bitcoin ASIC hardware giant detailed several strategies characteristic of an industry which is maturing. The strategies detailed include offering more attractive purchasing terms to customers, offering hedges against bitcoin price declining, and a co-mining agreement available to farm owners where Bitmain covers electricity costs.

What Impact do Miners Have on the Bitcoin Price Market? - Research issued by hedge fund Paradigma Capital highlights that miners account for a small share of Bitcoin on-chain volume and a minuscule amount of off-chain volume. While the research suggest that the impact of miners on Bitcoin price may be minimal, CEO of Blockware Solutions Matt D’Souza suggests that movements of funds from miners is far more significant than typical trading volume as it represents new capital coming into the market.

How has the Recent Price Drop Impacted Bitcoin Miner Profitability? - Although bitcoin price has declined significantly in recent weeks, data provided to MinerUpdate by TokenInsight suggests that most miners are still profitable. Efficient miners using latest generation hardware with an electricity cost of less than $0.03 per kWh may have an electricity cost as low as $1,400 per bitcoin mined.

CPU Mining Dominates Monero Since RandomX Upgrade - The Monero network has regularly hard forked since early 2018 to prevent ASICs from mining on the network. The latest upgrade to the RandomX mining algorithm has also largely pushed GPU miners away from the Monero network.

Power Efficient Hardware Dominates Bitcoin Mining in Q3 As Hardware Arms Race Unfolds - In their Q3 overview of the Bitcoin mining industry, research firm TokenInsight has highlighted that the most power-efficient hardware has outperformed amid the conditions of declining prices, rising hash rate, and rising difficulty levels. TokenInsight’s report discusses the pressure hardware manufacturers are feeling to release increasingly efficient hardware and anticipates updates relating to the Antminer S19 series and WhatsMiner M30 series in Q1 2020.

Best of the Rest -

What’s Halvening #2 - Cassie Clifton of Bitcoin Magazine is joined by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) researcher Apolline Blandin and MinerUpdate.com Head of Research John Lee Quigley. The trio discuss the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network and the real-time index which CCAF designed to estimate this consumption.

Bitcoin Mining in North America - Bitcoin Magazine’s Jessie Willms details Bitcoin mining developments in North America and Canada. With increasing amounts of regulatory uncertainty relating to mining in China, the prospects of the Bitcoin mining industry in North America is looking more promising than ever.

The State of Bitcoin Mining - The Messari team outline the latest fundraise to take place in the world of Bitcoin mining while giving an overview of some recent operations which have set up in North America. The team also detail some of the key takeaways from CoinShare’s latest research report.

About MinerUpdate.com

MinerUpdate.com is the leading crypto-mining publication. Our aim is to bridge the gap between the East to the West in mining while delivering to our readers the latest insights and developments in the industry. Our publication is ad-free, bias-free, with no conflict of interest when it comes to delivering high-quality content. In October 2019, MinerUpdate hosted MinerSummit.

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