Bitcoin Hashrate Plateaus After Slow And Steady Climb
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Data shows the Bitcoin mining hashrate seems to have hit a plateau since the beginning of March, after observing a steady rise for many months.
Bitcoin Mining Hashrate Has Mostly Moved Sideways In The Past Month
According to the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, the BTC hashrate has broken its upwards movement and has hit stagnation recently.
The “mining hashrate” is an indicator that measures the total amount of computing power currently present on the Bitcoin blockchain network.
Generally, the more is the hashrate, the better is the network peformance. Also the more globalized it is (that is, the degree of decentralization is more), the higher is the security of the chain.
When the value of this metric rises, it means more mining rigs are going online as miners get attracted to the crypto.
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On the other hand, a downtrend in the hashrate suggests miners aren’t finding it profitable to mine Bitcoin at the moment so they are taking their machine offline to cut the losses due to electricity costs.
Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the Bitcoin hashrate over the past year:
The indicator seems to have stagnated recently | Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 15, 2022
As you can see in the above graph, the Bitcoin hashrate had been on a steady rise since July 2021, up until the beginning of March 2022.
The mining hashrate set a new all-time high (ATH) during the period, but since then it has been mostly moving sideways.
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One reason for this trend could be the low mining profitability right now. Due to the struggling BTC price, and some other factors like high competition and low transaction fees, the mining profitability is at a 12-month low.
It’s unclear at the moment how long this trend may last, but in the future any surges in the price of Bitcoin should encourage more miners to jump in and existing ones to expand.
As things stand though, miners are facing extremely thin margins so the sideways movement will rather serve as relief for miners online right now as they don’t face increasing competition and even lesser profits that way.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $41.4k, up 2% in the past week. Over the last month, the crypto has lost 1% in value.
The below chart shows the trend in the price of the coin over the past five days.
Looks like the price of BTC has sharply risen over the past day | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image from Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Arcane Research
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