Bitcoin Mining Rigs Struggle for Profits, Despite BTC's Hashrate Reaching an All-Time High

Market News Jan 24, 2023 0 151 Add to Reading List

Bitcoin’s hashrate climbed to an all-time high (ATH) this week touching 166 exahash per second (EH/s) on October 14. Meanwhile, despite the recent price rise and hashrate ATH on Wednesday, only a small group of next-generation mining rigs are profiting at current bitcoin exchange rates.

The price of bitcoin (BTC) is hovering just above the $11K region and during the last few days, the network’s hashrate has touched a new ATH. At the time of writing, BTC’s hashrate is fluctuating between 130 to 140 exahash per second (EH/s), and on Wednesday evening (ET) the metric surpassed 166 EH/s.

Interestingly, the rise has continued despite the fact that BTC’s network difficulty has also reached an ATH at 19.69T. This means it is harder than ever before to find a block mining the BTC network, but this hasn’t phased the overall hashrate. The next BTC difficulty change is scheduled to happen in just a hair over two days’ time.

On Thursday, October 15, 2020, there are 18 known mining pools hashing away at the chain and a single unknown mining entity in the group as well. The top five pools mining on Thursday afternoon includes Btc.com (23.9 EH/s), F2pool (20.6 EH/s), Poolin (18.7 EH/s), Antpool (15.9 EH/s), and Huobi (11.3 EH/s).

While looking at the real-time mining hardware aggregator at asicvalue.com, with the filter set to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) and SHA256 miners only, the web portal shows only 13 rigs are profiting today by over $2 per day.

Statistics from asicvalue.com show 13 mining rigs profit at over $2 per day and 33 mining rigs profit below the $2 range if the mining operators are paying $0.06 per kWh.

There are 30 SHA256 mining rigs that are profiting at $0.11 to $1.89 per day at $0.06 per kWh. If the electrical costs are doubled at $0.12 per kWh then only two machines out of the 43 mining rigs profiting at $0.06 per kWh will profit.

At $0.12 per kWh, asicvalue.com indicates that only two mining rigs are profiting at today’s exchange rates on October 15, 2020.

The two top machines include Bitmain’s Antminer S19 Pro (110 TH/s) and the Microbt Whatsminer M30S++ (112 TH/s). The Whatsminer M30S+ follows, alongside the Antminer S19, Whatsminer M30S, Antminer T19, and the AvalonMiner 1166 Pro respectively.

A number of other cryptocurrency algorithms are showing higher profits than the SHA256 consensus algorithm. At the time of publication, the algorithms Equihash, Ethash, Tensority, and Eaglestrong show larger profits for miners mining these types of coins. Currently, miners who mine SHA256 coins (BTC, BCH, BSV) need around $0.06 per kWh to gather some decent profits above $2 per day.

Further, it would be better for BTC miners if the price was $1,100 higher than it is today so miners can recoup from the May block reward halving. In February, the blockchain analytics provider Tradeblock estimated a post-halving mining cost of around $12,500 per BTC.

Currently, the average coinbase reward value during the last 24-hours is around $71,390 per block with around $6,189 (0.54 BTC) in transaction fees. With BTC’s hashrate rising to new levels, the expected difficulty adjustment on October 17th will be increased a touch more than today.