Bitcoin miner revenue jumps by 50% in 4 days since record difficulty drop

Bitcoin (BTC) miner revenue jumped after the network saw its biggest-ever difficulty drop, data shows. According to figures from monitoring resource Blockchain.com, daily revenues have surged by over 50%. Bitcoin mining is currently in a unique state of flux — around half of the hashing power is offline as miners relocate from China, and it remains unknown how quickly they will be able to come back online. At the same time, those miners unaffected by the Chinese rout have seen half their competitors disappear overnight, and profitability has gone up as a result. With data now coming in for the past few weeks, the scale of the changes is plain to see. Daily mining revenue was around $20.7 million on Friday, the day before the difficulty adjustment. A day later, it hit $29.3 million, and by Tuesday this week — $31.9 million.

This is all a consequence of a “very interesting dynamic,” analytics firm Glassnode summarized in a video guide to this week’s edition of its newsletter, “The Week On-chain.” “We have a very interesting dynamic where approximately 50% of the hash power is currently offline and incurring a great number of costs due to logistics and just simply not hashing, having hardware that’s not currently working, and the other 50% has essentially seen half their competition drop off the network,” it explained. For active miners, profitability has reverted to around the levels seen when BTC/USD traded at $55,000–$60,000.

Some are spending treasuries due to relocation costs while being unable to mine new coins and receive a share of block rewards and fees. At the same time, others have been holding on to more BTC per block than they are spending — part of an uptrend that continues despite the drop in price, which has also reached over 50%.