- Bitcoin miners revenues dropped in September due to a rising network hash rate and increasing mining difficulty.
- Post-halving challenges, including lower rewards and higher costs, have significantly reduced Bitcoin mining profitability.
With their income declining and the lowest earnings month of the year in September 2024, Bitcoin miners faced big difficulties. The network’s hash rate, which increased by 2% from August and now stands at 643 exahashes per second (EH/s), can be blamed for this fall.
Consequently, the mining difficulty of Bitcoin peaked, so it is much more difficult for miners to create fresh Bitcoin even if they run full capacity. Miners’ average income per exahash was reduced by 6%, hence further restricting profits.
Bitcoin Miners Struggle with Rising Hash Rate and Operational Costs
The rising hash rate, which represents the rising computational capability committed to maintaining the Bitcoin network, has put more strain on miners already coping with higher running costs. The fact that on-chain activity has slowed down aggravates the situation.
Key source of miner income, transaction fees, have not been enough to offset the lower block rewards following events of Bitcoin halving. These factors have clearly lowered production; businesses like Bitfarms have seen their September output drop even with increased operational efficiency.
Moreover, big mining corporations have started changing their plans in reaction to these challenging circumstances. For instance, Hut 8 and Iris Energy have been trying to raise their operational capacity; Iris especially raised its Bitcoin output by 42% in September.
Many companies nevertheless battled to remain profitable despite these initiatives as the network’s complexity kept rising. This challenge has pushed miners to run more effectively, yet the higher expenses of sustaining and growing mining activities have kept revenues meager.
Conversely, the bigger market showed some rebound when the price of Bitcoin rose by about 7% in September. Still, the significant running expenses miners incur via the more challenging network make more than this price recovery could offset.
Many mining businesses are thus looking at other paths for maintaining their activities, including diversifying into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
Previously, CNF has revealed that Bitcoin miners made barely $816 million in September, which emphasizes the effect of declining transaction fees and increasing running costs. Moreover, post-halving difficulties, including reduced block rewards and more difficult mining, have kept undermining miner profitability.
Beside that, well-known mining company Terawulf sold 25% of Nautilus’s ownership to reinvest in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing in its New York plant, illustrating how miners are turning their attention toward cutting-edge technology to stay competitive in the changing scene.
