Skip to main content

If you have a Bitcoin miner, turn it on

The opportunity in Bitcoin mining has never looked better, and the U.S. has the infrastructure to take the chance.

In the last few weeks, the Bitcoin (BTC) mining market has experienced a black swan event, leading to a lot of uncertainty and confusion surrounding the future of the market. This is why I felt it was right to give the public a quick update and explain why it's a fantastic time for Bitcoin mining in the United States.

Bitcoin miners are rewarded Bitcoin for securing the network and for each block they mine. As more miners participate, the difficulty rate increases and the reward for each individual miner’s security contribution decreases. And vice versa, when fewer miners are participating, the difficulty rate decreases and the reward for each miner’s contribution increases. Understanding this is key as to why this is an exciting time to get into mining.

Related: A trade war misstep? China is vacating crypto battlefield to US banks

Recently, we have experienced a historic decrease in the difficulty rate. This chart shows the initial impact of Chinese miners being forced to shut down and move out of China.

Related: China crackdown shows industrial Bitcoin mining a problem for decentralization

There are many potential reasons why this occurred, but the net result is that an exodus of Chinese miners and their equipment has begun. As of July 2, the rate was adjusted by -27.94 percent. It was the fourth negative adjustment that happened in a row, “with the difficulty rate almost halving since mid-May.”

Let’s take a look at the most recent block time intervals.

Even with record-high Bitcoin prices, we are still anticipating additional rate decreases in the near future.

However, the difficulty decrease wasn’t over at that point, and with the additional drop of over 27% in early July, the volatility is still coming as the network catches up to the effects of all these miners going offline. These events have caused a lot of dramatic and quick changes to the crypto mining market, but their impacts can be boiled down to three major changes:

  • There is a shortage of low-cost electricity mining locations and power infrastructure in the market. There’s simply not enough infrastructure to absorb the demand coming from Chinese miners.
  • Equipment prices are dropping fast and profitability is increasing for miners. We estimate that equipment prices will fall to all-time lows given the flood of equipment, while mining profitability soars. As a result, we estimate mining profitability will increase by 35% after the difficulty adjustment.
  • Cheap power locations can take a year or more to negotiate, contract and develop. Given these circumstances, current operators have a unique opportunity because they already have established resources and partnerships that they can utilize.

The last time that the difficulty rate was around 15 trillion was in January 2020, with Bitcoin being worth only $7,000. Currently, the price of BTC is around $32,000, more than four times higher. With low-priced hardware for mining and the high price of Bitcoin, the opportunity in Bitcoin mining has never looked better. Right now, it's not about the mining equipment, it’s more about the infrastructure.

As all investors know, the time to invest is when costs are heavily discounted. For Bitcoin mining, that’s right now.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

William Szamosszegi is the CEO and founder of Sazmining Inc., a cryptocurrency mining developer and consulting firm, and host of Everything Crypto Mining: The Sazmining Podcast. He is bullish on Bitcoin's future as the dominant global digital reserve asset and believes Bitcoin is the solution for layer-one, sound money. William grew up in Maryland and studied psychology and management at Bucknell University. William spends his spare time working out, seeing friends and reading.


from https://ift.tt/2Vk8tEz
https://ift.tt/3fhnfmK

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DeFi isn’t dead, it just needs to fix these 3 critical problems

It’s been a rough year for DeFi, and it may not get any better until projects focus more on security, regulation and usability. The persistent challenges  decentralized finance  face have been well documented by a handful of analysts and the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem re-enforced the fact that something is critically wrong with DeFi. I think DeFi today is completely broken for 99% of the population. The promise of a more transparent financial system has been overtaken by greed. UST/LUNA is just the latest in a string of bad developments: — Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2022 Let's take a look at what experts say DeFi needs to do in order to have another revival.  Improved usability To date, the promise of open and uncensored access to a global decentralized financial system has been largely hampered by the complicated interface, confusing multi-step staking processes and lack of clarity surrounding the yields on various tokens. What do you thi...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community.  Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for  resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

National Futures Association adds rules for members handling digital assets

The CFTC-linked self-regulatory organization (SRO) has disclosure rules for members engaging in activities with BTC and ETH; now, standards of conduct are being added. The National Futures Association (NFA), the United States self-regulatory organization for derivatives markets, has issued a new compliance rule addressing members’ conduct. The new rule complements requirements issued in 2018. The NFA has “well over 100” members that engage in activities with digital asset commodities, but no way to address fraud or misconduct committed by those members, the organization explained to secretary of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Christopher Kirkpatrick in a Feb. 28 letter as it submitted the proposed new rule for approval. The new rule is modelled on the NFA’s antifraud rules for exchange traded futures and swaps transaction and retail foreign exchange. The NFA is the only registered self-regulatory organization that has delegated authority from the CFTC, giving it a...