The low price of Bitcoin (BTC), associated with other factors, caused the revenue obtained by cryptocurrency miners to fall to its lowest value in about two years. Total Bitcoin mining revenue, which adds up block rewards and transaction fees, dropped to $11.67 million. That is, around R$ 63 million at the current exchange rate in reais.
This is the lowest value since November 2, 2020, as found by Cointelegraph. At that time, Bitcoin’s trading price was around $13,500 – 20% below the current price of $16,200.
While the current BTC price suggests an increase in mining revenue compared to November 2020, other factors are contributing to the decline in revenues. This includes, for example, the constant increases in BTC mining difficulty and rising energy prices for mining equipment.
mining difficulty
The difficulty to mine a Bitcoin block has skyrocketed to an all-time high of nearly 37 trillion. As a consequence, this has forced Bitcoin miners to expend more energy and computational power to stay competitive.
BTC mining difficulty adjustments occur every 2016 blocks. That is, approximately every two weeks, in sync with the network hash rate. The difficulty of mining a Bitcoin block refers to the complexity of the mathematical process behind mining. This factor automatically adjusts to keep the time required to mine a new block constant at around 10 minutes.
As more computing power connects to the network, the difficulty increases. On the other hand, as computing power leaves the network, the difficulty decreases. In addition, the mining difficulty also reflects the security of the Bitcoin network. After all, the higher the mining difficulty and hash rate, the more difficult it is to organize an attack against BTC.
Meanwhile, in recent months, the Bitcoin network hash rate has steadily declined. The current hash rate is around 226 exahash per second (EH/s). This is down more than 28.6% from the all-time high of 316.7 EH/s on October 31, 2022. Hash rate is a metric that helps protect the Bitcoin network from spending attacks double.
