While Bitcoin’s price fell below the $20,000 region, the network’s hash rate fell below the 200 exahash per second (EH/s) region to 167 EH/s on June 18. At the time of writing, the hash rate has been rebounding slightly after a small dip of 184 EH/s. With the price of each bitcoin lower and the hash rate lower this week, bitcoin miners may take a four-day break as the network’s difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) is expected to slip 2.8% from the current mining difficulty metric.
Bitcoin’s hash rate slips amid price drop, DAA expected to move down in 4 days
Bitcoin miners have seen less and less profit this week as the price of Bitcoin (BTC) fell to a low of $18,732 per unit on June 18, 2022. The price of Bitcoin has not been this low since December 2020, with the exchange rate causing the hashrate to slip by about 15% in the past 24 hours.
The hash rate has not reached a low of 167 EH/s since the first week of March 2022, as it is still well above the 200 EH/s region most of the time. At the time of writing, the hash rate is around 184 EH/s or 8% lower than the 200 EH/s region.
Bitcoin’s fiat exchange rate makes a large number of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rigs currently unprofitable. With electricity bills at $0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), only three ASIC devices are profitable today.
Bitmain’s Antminer S19 XP has an estimated profit of $2.91 in BTC at 140 terahertz per second (TH/s), while Microbt’s 126 TH/s Whatsminer M50S has an estimated profit of $0.99 per day. However, if electricity costs $0.05 per kWh, then a few dozen ASIC mining rigs producing 30 TH/s or more could be profitable.
Eight days ago, Bitcoin miners also saw an increase in mining difficulty, making it harder for miners to find block rewards. The increase in DAA coupled with the falling price makes it harder for Bitcoin miners to make a profit.
However, with less than 600 blocks left until the next DAA shift on June 22, the difficulty is expected to drop by 2.8%, which will ease some of the pressure on miners. At the time of writing, the average block time is around 10 to 17 minutes, and the no-fee block reward is around $119,838.
SHA256-based crypto networks Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoinsv hashrate drop
Today, the top five mining pools include Foundry USA, F2pool, Antpool, Binance Pool, and Viabtc. Foundry is the top mining pool at the time of writing, accounting for 20.91% of the global hashrate or 42.05 EH/s.
F2pool controlled 15.82% of the global hashrate at 31.81 EH/s on Saturday morning (ET). Foundry found 78 of the 373 blocks in three days, while F2pool found 59 blocks. There are 13 known mining pools today, and stealth miners or “unknown” hashrates account for 2.14% of the global hashrate, or 4.31 EH/s.
Also, while the hash rate of BTC has dropped recently, so has the hash rate of other cryptoassets that utilize the SHA256 consensus algorithm. On Saturday, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network was at around 1.21 EH/s and the Bitcoinsv (BSV) network was at 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 merged mining power.
What do you think of Bitcoin’s hash rate below 200 EH/s and the state of other SHA256-based crypto networks? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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