After the collapse of November 2018, Bitcoin’s hashrate started to rise again, touching a new record in 2019.
In fact, on March 19th the hashrate returned to over 52 million TH/s, the last time it reached this level was on November 11th. The all-time high was reached on August 27th, 2018, reaching nearly 62 million TH/s, thus the 52 million of March 19th are not so far away.
This new increase denotes a new strong interest among miners, as confirmed by the fact that Bitmain’s latest Z11 ASICs were sold out in the pre-sale phase in just 20 minutes from the official launch.
However, these are machines for extracting Proof of Work coins equipped with Equihash, such as Zcash, and not Bitcoin.
This is despite the difficulties of Bitmain itself, which seems not to have yet recovered from the great crypto winter of 2018.
For example, AntPool, owned by Bitmain, has been pushed to second place by Poolin in terms of the number of mined blocks in the last 7 days, and Bitmain has dropped to 25%, compared to almost 50% in June last year.
The renewed interest in mining, and in particular in bitcoin, seems to clash with respect to the mainstream narrative which would like to see BTC and cryptocurrencies in great crisis.
In fact, it is plausible that the increase in the hashrate actually implies an increase in the confidence of the miners, and a reversal of the trend with respect to the “abandonment” of mining at the end of 2018, when the hashrate was halved in a month.
It is probable that at the time many miners decided to turn off the machines to avoid mining at a loss, and now they have begun to restart them because they are more confident in being able to mine at a profit.
The Bitcoin protocol explicitly provides for a reduction of difficulty for mining in the event of a drop in the hashrate, and thus profitability increases accordingly. In other words, the system adapts to always find a new point of equilibrium that allows the mining industry to continue.
