Bitcoin’s Sinking Price Pushes Hashrate Below 200 Exahash, Mining Difficulty Expected to Slide 2.8% Lower

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. At the time of writing, the hashrate is coasting along at 184 EH/s after a slight rebound following the drop. 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.

It is becoming less profitable for bitcoin miners this week as the price of bitcoin (BTC) slid to a low of $18,732 per unit on June 18, 2022. The price of bitcoin has not been this low since December 2020 and the exchange rate has caused the hashrate to slide roughly 15% during the past 24 hours.

The hashrate has not tapped a low of 167 EH/s since the first week of March 2022, as a great majority of the time it remained well above the 200 EH/s zone. At the time of writing, the hashrate is around 184 EH/s or 8% lower than the 200 EH/s region.

Bitcoin’s fiat exchange rate has made it so a great number of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rigs are currently unprofitable. With electricity costs at $0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), only three ASIC devices are profitable today.

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. However, if electrical costs are $0.05 per kWh, then a few dozen ASIC mining rigs that produce 30 TH/s or more can profit.

Eight days ago, bitcoin miners also saw the mining difficulty increase, which makes it harder for miners to find block rewards. The DAA increase combined with the price decline has made it even harder for bitcoin miners to secure profits.

However, with just under 600 blocks left until the next DAA shift on June 22, the difficulty is expected to decrease by 2.8%, which will alleviate some of the pressure miners are facing. 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.

Today, the top five mining pools include Foundry USA, F2pool, Antpool, Binance Pool, and Viabtc, respectively. Foundry is the top mining pool at the time of writing, with 20.91% of the global hashrate or 42.05 EH/s.

F2pool commands 15.82% of the global hashrate with 31.81 EH/s on Saturday morning (ET). While Foundry found 78 blocks out of the 373 mined in three days, F2pool discovered 59 blocks. 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.

Statistics show that BCH has lost 77.83% of its computational processing power since May 14, 2021, and BSV has shed 88.53% of its hashpower since January 15, 2020. Interestingly, the SHA256-based crypto namecoin (NMC), has 131 EH/s due to its merge mining capabilities.

What do you think about bitcoin’s hashrate sliding below 200 EH/s and the state of other SHA256-based crypto networks? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.