In August, the bitcoin mining revenue saw its first monthly increase since March. It grew 10%.
Bitcoin Mining Revenue Soars
The Block Research has compiled statistics that show miners made $657million last month.
The latest update, published Wednesday, showed that the difficulty in mining Bitcoin increased by 9.26% and the hashrate increased by over 13%.
According to Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of mining strategy at Foundry, which manages the Foundry USA mining pool, the increase in hash rate is caused by “a combination of heat waves finally subsiding (on a global level) and facilities slowly coming online,” “There’s also the added kicker of the higher efficiency Bitmain S19 XP’s finally hitting the market as well!”
Source: The Block Crypto Data.
Transaction fees accounted for only a small fraction of pioneer crypto mining’s profits, while the bulk ($647.72m) was derived from block reward subsidies. The transaction costs of bitcoin have fallen to 1.4% from the overall revenue.
In August 2018, Ethereum miners earned $725 million, which is nearly 1.1x more than the bitcoin miners.
Increased Mining Difficulty
Mining bitcoin has become more difficult. Data from BTC.com shows that the difficulty of mining bitcoin, which is the most popular cryptocurrency worldwide, has increased by 9.26% in the past two weeks.
The website’s analysis reveals that the network’s mining difficulty is at its highest point since January, reaching 30.97 trillion, with the hashrate currently averaging around 230 exahashes per second (EH/s).
Texas’ miners stopped work last month to save electricity and support the electric system during heat waves. This probably made Bitcoin mining easier.
They turned on again weeks later. As the difficulty level rises, miners might see their income drop as more computing power and energy is needed. However, the Bitcoin price has not changed.
BTC/USD trades starting at $20k Source: TradingView
TradingView data shows that the current price of Bitcoin was $20,060 as of the writing. The price of Bitcoin has fallen 70% since November’s record-breaking $69,044 and it has struggled for months to reach the $25,000 mark.
Featured image taken from FT. Chart from TradingView.com. The Block