Bitcoin’s hash rate exceeded 150 EH/s, thus reaching a new all-time high. This increase may be associated with the creation of new mining farms in the United States.
In recent days, Bitcoin recorded a new all-time high for its hash rate. New movements in the price of the main cryptocurrency, which could reach USD 11,000 in the coming days, accompanied this event.
The new high of Bitcoin’s hash rate was 151.24 EH/s last September 14th, according to data from Glassnode. Concerning BitInfoCharts, it indicated that that figure was 150 EH/s on September 13th and then fell.
According to data from Coinwarz, Bitcoin’s hash rate last September 13th was at 163.88 EH/s. However, it had recorded the high on September 7th when that value reached 175.90 EH/s. The discrepancy between these records has to do with the nature of distributed networks. In them, each node maintains its record with the information that it receives from the network.
The new high for computing power, which indicates the network’s security level, occurs after consecutive weeks of increases. It also suggests that September could be the start of a period of increased activity for Bitcoin miners.
The next difficulty adjustment (the periodic event that determines the level of difficulty to mine on the blockchain) will probably lead to a momentary decrease in equipment that does not have enough mining power. This would make it unprofitable for them to operate at such high levels of difficulty.
However, over time, there have been two determining factors regarding the increase in the network’s hash rate. These are the launch of new equipment to mine Bitcoin and the spread of mining as a business model.
Profitability of Bitcoin’s Hash Rate
According to data from the Hashrate Index, miners’ profits for each TH/s invested in the Bitcoin network decreased by 19.62% between August 18th and September 15th. This fact relates to the progressive increase in the hash rate in recent weeks since it suggests that more miners are competing with each other for the mining reward.
This value by itself is not enough to calculate the specific performance of each miner. To obtain a more precise calculation, it is possible to compare this average with other indices that allow calculating the profit based on the energy expenditure for each TH invested in the network.
In this way, the computers using fewer joules for each TH invested in the processing network, tend to perform better. Since September 6th, the mining devices spending less than 38 J/TH have earned USD 27.87 per day, those spending between 38 J/TH and 60 J/TH have earned USD 27 a day, those spending between 80 J/TH and 100 J/TH have earned USD 10.94, and those spending more than 100 J/TH have only earned USD 2 per day.
Naturally, these values depend on the price of energy, so miners have always needed to calculate the benefits according to the price of electricity in the region where their facilities are located.
Bitcoin Mining Has Been Migrating
Mining groups from China could be migrating to Russia, Canada, and the United States, according to recent reports. This is due in part to new restrictions such as the elimination of the energy subsidy to mine cryptocurrencies in the north of the Asian country.
According to Jhonson Xu, an analyst at data rating agency Tokeninsight, there have been “waves of farms starting to build their infrastructure outside of China, especially in North America since 2019.”
US company Marathon Patent Group has been buying facilities in the United States and already has a capacity of 1,634 PH/s hash rate. They expect to increase their capacity from 15 MW to 45 MW in the coming months.
One of the leading manufacturers of ASIC equipment, Bitmain, has also started migrating its infrastructure to places like Texas. They plan to install a Bitcoin mining farm with 50 MW of energy consumption in that US state.
This company recently acquired a significant batch of 5-nm chips from TSMC, which provides processors to Intel and Apple. This could be a gateway to an increase in the number of devices connected to the network.
By Alexander Salazar
