Miners

As the 3rd Bitcoin halving event scheduled for March 12 nears, many countries are rethinking their opinion on crypto mining. Sichuan, which initially banned crypto production, is now backing it and will lower electricity cost for miners.

The outbreak of COVID-19 might push smaller miners out of the Bitcoin mining Industry. It has been caused by both cryptocurrency price collapse and the shortage of the supply of new Bitcoin mining ASICS. There is even a theory that the pandemics could kill crypto mining completely.

The outbreak of the new coronavirus in China has halted economic activities in the mainland which is the key producer of Bitcoin mining Hardware. As fewer mining machines are added to mine Bitcoin, the difficulty algorithm is relaxed as the competition between miners reduces. The Universal hashing power towards the Bitcoin network is somewhat constant.

Recently the 18 millionth bitcoin was mined accounting for about 85.714% of the total available Bitcoins. The cryptocurrency is nearer to its pre-programmed mining cap of 21 million coins. Here we will review what these figures mean for Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin price in General.

The Ukrainian security authorities have detained cryptocurrency miners at a nuclear energy plant. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the law-enforcement agency and primary government security body in the fields of counterintelligence operation and fighting terrorism, arrested many people for illicitly mining Bitcoin and other digital assets at the country’s nuclear power plant (NPP).

Today, Bitcoin mining activity seems to be a hurdle for most anonymous participants due to the massive competition originating from the giant pools. So far, some of the biggest miners we have in the industry include BTC.com, F2Pool, AntPool, BTC.TOP, Poolin, Huibi.pool, SlushPool, ViaBTC and many others. However, the largest share of about 40% is currently taken by only three companies, of which two of these (BTC.com and Antpool) are managed by one company (Bitmain). This has brought a lot of queries in the blockchain and digital asset industry and has left people thinking that the flagship crypto is on the brink of becoming a centralized cryptocurrency.

It has become very competitive and expensive to mine Bitcoin than Ever. The BTC mining difficulty has hit a new record high at about 7.93 trillion. The figure represents a 7% increase from the previous number of 7.45 trillion. Bitcoin adjusts its difficulty after every 2,016 which is about 2 weeks.

Police detectives in the Chinese City of Zhenjiang recently confiscated about 4,000 bitcoin mining computers. According to the police, the miners illegally connected their mining machine to the Electricity grid. Further report indicates that electricity worth more than $3m was illegally used for mining.

The people who adopted Bitcoin earlier, benefited a lot from it, especially during the cryptocurrency bubble in December 2017 when they saw weighty block rewards and massive gains from this money-spinning new venture. The time when Bitcoin had just surfaced, its mining was relatively cheap, but when its price and popularity started to increase uniformly, the mining difficulty followed suit. Now, pools appear to be a big deal for crypto investors who want to venture into mining.