The Week On-Chain<\/span><\/a><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The latest Glassnode report focuses on the topic of the day: bitcoin mining. While bitcoin\u2019s 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\u2019t? 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: \u201cBitcoin 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.\u201d The thing is, we\u2019re in a bear market. The sentiment is fearful. There\u2019s 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, \u201ca new dynamic as more of the hashpower is held by better capitalised publicly traded mining companies\u201d? Or is it just the game theory behind bitcoin at work? Remember that mining revenue is also down and the cost to produce one bitcoin is going up in tandem with electricity prices.\u00a0 Related Reading: Glassnode: Bitcoin Is Currently In \u201cBear To Bull\u201d Transition Period Making the situation more volatile, the miner revenue\u2019s bitcoin is at a low point. This \u201cshould, in theory, create elevated income stress on the mining industry.\u201d Add bitcoin\u2019s stable prices to that equation and, what do we have? \u201cIt is extremely rare for BTC prices to stay so stationary for long, suggesting heightened probabilities of volatility on the horizon.\u201d Bitcoin Hashrate All-Time High | Source: The Week On-Chain Bullish Signal: Bitcoin Hash-Ribbons Unwind According to Glassnode, \u201cthe Bitcoin hash-ribbons commenced an unwind in late August, providing an indication that mining conditions were improving, and hashrate was coming back online.\u201d What does this mean and why is it bullish, though? \u201cAlmost all historical hash-ribbon unwinds have preceded greener pastures in the months that followed.\u201d According to Glassnode, since bitcoin\u2019s price is still flatlining, the \u201chashrate rise is due to more efficient mining hardware coming online and\/or miners with superior balance sheets having a larger share of the hashpower network.\u201d That\u2019s the base of Glassnode\u2019s takeover theory. Glassnode Proposes \u201cThe Mining Halving\u201d Concept Another of their wild theories, Glassnode poses that \u201ca 66% increase in Difficulty and Hashrate since Oct-2020 corresponds to an approximate halving in revenue per hash.\u201d And to support that, they provide these numbers: \u201cthe revenue earned per Exahash has been in a persistent and long-term downtrend, with the BTC-denominated reward currently at an all-time-low of 4.06 BTC per EH per day.\u201d So, if miners are getting destroyed by market conditions, why is the hashrate recording all-time highs? The answer might lie with the Puell Multiple, \u201cwhich is a cyclical oscillator that compares the current daily mining revenue to their yearly average.\u201d According to this indicator, the mining business is actually gaining ground against previous performance.\u00a0 \u201cThe Puell Multiple hit the current lows of around 0.33 in June, indicating that miners were earning just 33% of their yearly average revenue. It has since recovered to around 0.63, implying a degree of stress relief, and adjustment to this new pricing regime.\u201d According to Glassnode, this relief might mean that \u201ca true bear market low is established.\u201d BTC price chart for 10\/11\/2022 on Bitstamp | Source: BTC\/USD on TradingView.com Glassnode Thinks There\u2019s Still Capitulation Risk Let\u2019s be clear, bitcoin is walking a tightrope at the moment. The market is about to break and the pendulum could swing either way. Even though there are reasons to be optimistic, the smart investor should prepare for the worst. \u201cBy numerous models, we estimate that the average cost of BTC production hovers just below current prices, such that any significant price decline could turn an implied income stress, into acute and explicit stress.\u201d Related Reading: Glassnode Report Shows Bitcoin And Ethereum Derivatives Gain Massive Traction To assess the risk, Glassnode determined \u201cthe aggregate size of miner balances\u201d to 78.4K BTC. The owners of those reserves \u201cmay come under income stress,\u201d but \u201cIt is extremely unlikely this full amount would be distributed.\u201d And that’s where we stand at the moment. Featured Image by Icons8_team from Pixabay | Charts by TradingView and The Week On-Chain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":539,"featured_media":505759,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[87175,87173,87172,84341,640,87169,87171,61309,84798,87174,87170,85269],"class_list":["post-505753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-better-capitalised-publicly-traded-mining-companies","tag-bitcoin-miners-capitulation","tag-bitcoin-miners-income-stress","tag-bitcoin-miners-reserve","tag-bitcoin-mining","tag-bitcoon-difficulty-increase","tag-capitulation-risk","tag-glassnode","tag-hashrate-all-time-high","tag-the-aggregate-size-of-miner-balances","tag-the-puell-multiple","tag-the-week-on-chain"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Glassnode On Bitcoin Mining: Difficulty Reaches ATH, Profitability Decreases<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n