While bitcoin’s price dropped below the $20K region, the network’s hashrate slipped under the 200 exahash per second (EH/s) region to 167 EH/s on June 18. The hashrate was at 184EH/s as of the writing date, following a small rebound from the decline. With the price per bitcoin lower this week and the hashrate dropping, bitcoin miners may get a break in four days as the network’s difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) is expected to slide 2.8% lower than today’s current mining difficulty metric.
Bitcoin’s Hashrate Slides Lower Amid Price Drop, DAA Expected to Shift Downward in 4 Days
This week bitcoin miners find it less lucrative to mine bitcoins as the bitcoin price (BTC) fell to $18,732 per bitcoin unit on June 18th 2022. Since December 2020, the price of bitcoin is at an all-time low. The exchange rate has also caused the hashrate’s drop to approximately 15% in the last 24 hours.
As the hashrate has not reached a minimum of 167 EH/s in the past week of March 20,22, the vast majority of time it has remained above 200 EH/s. The hashrate currently stands at 184 EH/s, which is 8% less than the region of 200 EH/s.
Bitcoin’s fiat exchange rate has made it so a great number of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rigs are currently unprofitable. Only three ASIC devices can be profitable right now, with electricity prices at $0.12 per Kilowatt-hour (kWh).
Bitmain’s Antminer S19 XP with 140 terahash per second (TH/s) gets an estimated $2.91 in BTC profits per day, while Microbt’s Whatsminer M50S with 126 TH/s gets an estimated $0.99 per day in profit. If electrical costs average $0.05/kWh, then only a handful of ASIC mining rigs can make a profit if they produce at least 30 TH/s.
Bitcoin miners saw their mining difficulty rise eight days ago. This makes it more difficult for them to get block rewards. Bitcoin miners have had to work harder than ever in order to earn profits, due to both the DAA and declining prices.
With just 600 blocks remaining until June 22nd’s DAA shift, the difficulty will decrease by 2.8%. This should ease some of the stress that miners face. Block times on average have been about 10 – 17 minutes and a block reward without fees is around $119,838 at the time of writing.
Crypto Networks Based on SHA256 Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoinsv Hashes Drop
Foundry USA is the most prominent mining pool today, followed by Antpool and Binance Pool as well as F2pool and Antpool. Foundry, which has 20.91% global havehrate and 42.05 EH/s is the most popular mining pool as of this writing, holds the number one spot.
F2pool holds 15.82% share of global hashrate, with 31.81 EH/s as of Saturday morning ET. F2pool found 59 blocks, while Foundry discovered 78 of 373 blocks in just three days. There are 13 known mining pools today and stealth miners or “unknown” hashrate commands 2.14% of the global hashrate, or 4.31 EH/s.
Additionally, while BTC’s hashrate has dropped in recent times, other crypto assets that leverage the SHA256 consensus algorithm have seen hashrate drops as well. The hashpower behind the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is roughly 1.21 EH/s on Saturday and the Bitcoinsv (BSV) network’s hashpower is 0.57 EH/s.
BCH’s computational power has dropped by 77.83% since May 14, 2021. BSV, on the other hand has seen a drop of 88.53% in its hashpower from January 15, 2020. Interestingly, NMC, a SHA256-based cryptonamecoin has 131 EH/s thanks to its merger mining capabilities.
What do you think about bitcoin’s hashrate sliding below 200 EH/s and the state of other SHA256-based crypto networks? Please comment below to let us know your thoughts on this topic.
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