While the bitcoin price fell below the $20,000 mark, the network’s hash rate dropped below the 200 exahash per second (EH/s) mark to 167 EH/s on June 18. At the time of writing, the hash rate had recovered slightly after a small drop to 184 EH/s. With the price per bitcoin lower this week and the hash rate falling, bitcoin miners may be taking a four-day break as the network’s difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) is expected to deviate by 2.8% from its current difficulty metric.
Bitcoin’s hash rate drops as price drops, DAA expected to drop in 4 days
Bitcoin miners are seeing declining profits this week as the price of Bitcoin ( BTC ) fell to a low of $18,732 per unit on June 18, 2022. The bitcoin price hasn’t been this low since December 2020, and the exchange rate has led to a decline in computing power of about 15% in the last 24 hours.
The hash rate has not hit such a low of 167 EH/s since the first week of March 2022, and for the most part remains well above the 200 EH/s regions. At the time of writing, the hash rate is 184 EH/s, which is 8% below the 200 EH/s regions.
Bitcoin’s hash rate has not fallen this low since March 2022.
Bitcoin’s legal exchange rate currently makes a large number of Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) mining devices unprofitable. Only three ASIC devices are currently profitable due to electricity costs of $0.12/kWh.
Bitmain’s Antminer S19 XP generates an estimated $2.91 per day in BTC profits at 140 megahashes per second (TH/s), while Microbt’s Whatminer M50S generates an estimated $0.99 per day at 126 megahashes per second (TH/s). However, dozens of ASIC mining rigs producing 30 TH/s or more would only be profitable if electricity costs were $0.05 per kWh.
Eight days ago, bitcoin miners also saw an increase in mining difficulty, making it harder for miners to find block rewards. The rise in DAA combined with the drop in price has made it harder for bitcoin miners to turn a profit.
However, with just under 600 blocks remaining before the next DAA shift on June 22, the difficulty level is expected to drop by 2.8%, which will alleviate some of the pressure miners are facing. At the time of writing, the average blocking time was 10 to 17 minutes and the no-fee blocking premium was $119,838.
SHA256-based crypto networks Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoinsv hash rate drops
The top five mining pools include Foundry USA, F2pool, Antpool, Binance Pool, and Viabtc. Foundry is the leading pool at the time of writing, with a 20.91% share of the global hash rate, or 42.05 EH/s.
F2pool controls 15.82% of the global hash rate with 31.81 EH/s as of Saturday morning (ET). 78 of the 373 blocks were discovered by Foundry in three days, while F2pool discovered 59 blocks. There are currently 13 known mining pools, with “stealth miners” or “unknowns” accounting for 2.14% of the world’s computing power, or 4.31 EH/s.
In addition, BTC’s hash rate has dropped recently, as have the hash rates of other cryptocurrencies that use the SHA256 consensus algorithm. On Saturday, the Bitcoin Cash ( BCH ) network had a hash rate of around 1.21 EH/s and the Bitcoinsv ( BSV ) network had a hash rate of 0.57 EH/s.
Statistics show that BCH has lost 77.83% of its computing power since May 14, 2021, and BSV has lost 88.53% of its computing power since January 15, 2020. Interestingly, the SHA256-based crypto-name coin (NMC) has 131 EH/s due to its combined mining performance.