Income bitcoin miners in the first six months of 2018, totaled a record $4.7 billion, however, the growing competition and the increasing complexity of the calculations make the first cryptocurrency less profitable and put at a disadvantage smaller players. This is stated in a new study by the research firm Diar.
It is noteworthy that these figures for the first half of 2018 thus $1.4 billion exceeded the total in 2017, while the miners themselves earn about 54 000 BTC per month.
Despite this, those who are forced to pay for electricity at retail prices in September for the first time in recent years, turned negative, analysts say.
At the moment one of the few countries where the cost of electricity still makes a certain commercial sense for bitcoin mining is China with an average cost per kWh of about $0,08. However, at the current rate of bitcoin, which remains approximately at one level a big part of 2018, the cost of equipment, salaries of personnel and other costs for small businesses mining bitcoin is already almost unprofitable.
According to Diar, only large pools, controlled Chinese manufacturer of equipment for mining Bitmain, while you can still make mining bitcoins. However, according to Bitmain, 95% of the company’s revenues accounted for by sales of equipment but not on domestic production of cryptocurrency.
Moreover, to reduce the cost of electricity and profitability of owned farms Bitmain will be forced to allocate its capacity among different countries. In particular, in the first quarter of 2019, the company plans to open three new data center in the United States.
“At low energy costs for leading industrial mining companies that operate on a profit of 50-60%, the space for the growth of the market is still there, but the profit will continue to decline. Today, and most likely it will continue in the future, mining bitcoin becomes more and more a lot of the big players with wide financial opportunities,” conclude the researchers.
We will remind, in September, the co-founder of F2Pool Xing Yu published a list of 23 devices for mining and the threshold prices of cryptocurrencies, below which the production of digital assets will be unprofitable.
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