An Updated Look at Bitcoin Miner Profitability

Despite bitcoin’s 40% price decline year-to-date, the network’s total hashrate has gained over 30% from 174EH/s in January to all-time-highs around 220EH/s at the moment. That effectively means bitcoin’s hashprice – the dollar revenue that each terahash per second of computing power can generate on a daily basis – has more than halved over the past four months and is at its lowest point since November 2020. 

With the latest mining difficulty jump recorded on May 11, the bitcoin network has reached a point where some of the older generations of equipment from the 2016 to 2018 era have become unprofitable at an industry average energy rate of $60 per megawatt-hour (mWh). While the network hashrate generally tends to follow bitcoin’s price movements, we may not see any notable difficulty correction imminently unless bitcoin’s price keeps plunging towards $20,000 because the mining landscape, after an exponential growth in 2021, has complicated the dynamics. In this piece, we dive into the various factors that are changing bitcoin ASIC miner profitability and how we may finally start to see the end of Bitmain’s AntMiner S9 series, hailed as the long-time ASIC King.