In January, publicly traded Bitcoin miners experienced a significant decline in production, marking a 15% decrease. This drop coincided with record highs in mining difficulty and hash rate, creating a challenging environment for miners.
Collectively, miners produced 3,267 BTC, with Riot Platforms being the only major miner to report a modest increase of 2.1%. In contrast, several other companies faced declines in their output, including:
- Marathon Digital
- CleanSpark
- Iris Energy
- Core Scientific
- Cipher Mining
- Bitfarms
- Hut 8
This reduction in production is attributed to a 5.6% rise in mining difficulty, which reached 114.1 trillion at block height 883,008, reversing a previous decline. Simultaneously, Bitcoin’s hash rate achieved a new peak of 845.42 EH/s, indicating intensified competition among miners. This competitive landscape necessitates increased computational power and energy consumption, leading to a decline in mining profitability, with hashprice dropping to $54 per petahash daily, nearing its one-month low of $52 recorded in mid-January.
📎 Related coverage from: cryptoslate.com