Glassnode On Bitcoin Mining: Difficulty Reaches ATH, Profitability Decreases

The latest Glassnode report focuses on the topic of the day: bitcoin mining. While bitcoin’s price has been suspiciously flat for a while, the difficulty adjustment came in and registered an all-time high. Do the miners know something we don’t? Or is there a transfer of power going on behind the scenes? Glassnode poses a working theory on their latest The Week On-Chain. To begin with, Glassnode puts the difficulty adjustment into perspective: “Bitcoin hashrate has reached a new all-time-high of 242 Exahash per second. To give an analogy for scale, this is equivalent to all 7.753 Billion people on earth, each completing a SHA-256 hash calculation approximately 30 Billion times every second.” The thing is, we’re in a bear market. The sentiment is fearful. There’s trouble brewing everywhere in the world and bitcoin has been boring for a while now. What could be the reason for a hashrate all-time high? Is it, as Glassnode theorizes, “a new dynamic as more of the hashpower is held by better capitalised publicly traded mining companies”? Or is it just the game theory behind bitcoin at work? Remember that mining revenue is also down and the cost of one bitcoin is going up in tandem with electricity prices. Related Reading: Glassnode: Bitcoin Is Currently In “Bear To Bull” Transition Period Making the situation more volatile, the miner revenue’s bitcoin is at a low point. This “should, in theory, create elevated income stress on the m...