Bitcoin’s price has surged to levels last seen in November 2021, with ETFs emerging as the main driver behind this bullish price action. Greed is starting to dominate market sentiment amidst this rise. Despite low transaction fees, hashprice has emerged as the big winner of the week, being pushed back above $90/PH/Day by the BTC price increase. Many currencies are experiencing all-time highs; the question seems to be not if, but when the Dollar will follow suit. In this week’s mining economics rundown, we will delve into the following topics:
Bitcoin Price
Network Hashrate
Difficulty
Transaction Fees
Hashprice
ASIC Prices
Fun Fact
Bitcoin Price
BTC has been very bullish recently. In just four days, Bitcoin surged by 11.5%, reaching a current value of around $56,500. This marks the highest price level since November 2021.
One of the main drivers for the price increase since January has been the influx of ETF investments. According to Bloomberg, spot Bitcoin ETFs hit an all-time volume record on Monday, reaching $2.4 billion. This surpassed the volume of the first trading day and doubled the recent daily average.
The Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index currently stands at 79 out of 100, indicating extreme greed in the market. Adding to the bullish sentiment, Michael Saylor announced that MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 3,000 BTC for approximately $155 million, at an average price of $51,813 per bitcoin. This brings MicroStrategy’s total Bitcoin holdings to 193,000 BTC, acquired for approximately $6.09 billion, with an average purchase price of $31,544.
In various currencies, Bitcoin has already reached a new all-time high. However, for Bitcoin to achieve record highs in USD, price would need to increase by another 20%.
Network Hashrate
After crossing the 600 EH/s level, the network hashrate retraced over 9% back to 548 EH/s. Over the last few days, the hashrate has been crawling back up and is now 16 EH/s away from reaching above the 600 EH/s mark again.
Difficulty
On February 15th, we observed the largest difficulty increase in almost a year, with an upward adjustment of 8.24%. Currently, the network difficulty stands at 81.73 T. The next difficulty adjustment is estimated to be -2.7% and is projected for the 29th of February.
Transaction Fees
The mempool, which holds pending transactions, is continuing to clear up, resulting in a further decrease in transaction fees. Transaction fees, as a percentage of the total block reward, have reached levels last observed in November 2023.
In 2024, the competition for block space has slowed down, with fewer transactions being added compared to the end of last year. However, as the halving approaches, this dynamic might shift. The uniqueness of the first blocks post-halving could trigger users to compete for block space, potentially elevating transaction fees.
Hashprice
Hashprice has emerged as the big winner of the week, benefiting from bullish price action. It hovered around the $80/PH/Day level for a couple of days before BTC pushed hashprice back up to $90/PH/Day. With a slight downward difficulty adjustment on the horizon, hashprice is currently looking solid.
ASIC Prices
Since the beginning of the year, ASIC prices have remained virtually unchanged, suggesting that mining equipment may be bottoming out
This muted price action might continue until after the halving. The reduction in block subsidy will force miners to take less efficient machines offline, either shutting them down or replacing them with newer generations. As a result, machines with energy consumption ranging from 25 to 38 J/TH will become more readily available on the secondary market, potentially driving prices down further. Conversely, demand for the latest generation, boasting sub-20 J/TH efficiency, is likely to increase, potentially driving up prices for these machines. Currently, production of these latest generation miners exceeds demand, so any price increase might occur with a delay as the market needs time to absorb the surplus miners available on the spot market first.
Fun Fact
Braiins Pool is introducing lightning pay-outs. They will be the first mining pool using the lightning network.
“Our decision to integrate the Lightning Network comes from a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities within the mining community,” said Kristian Csepcsar, Chief of Propaganda at Braiins. “We also found from internal research with the mining community that LN was a highly requested feature; miners really love experimenting with cutting-edge technology, and in this case, Lightning could also improve their privacy by avoiding address reuse and enabling them to take advantage of all the Lightning features like lower fees and no permanent information on the blockchain.”
