Bitcoin Forum

According to CoinMetrics data: The miners hold 800,000 BTC (4.2% of the supply), making them one of the biggest whales in the market. Consequently, their every move has a strong impact on the market.


https://i.imgur.com/E6o9Kb6.jpg
Data from Arcane shows that “public” Bitcoin miners sold 100% of their BTC production in May (Sold Out) compared to the usual 20-40% previously.
Although these public companies only account for 20% of the total hashrate of the bitcoin blockchain, their actions partly reflect the general situation of all other miners.




https://i.imgur.com/YGtiDXy.jpg
The number of bitcoins continuously being sent to the exchange, reaching a record high since January 2021.




https://i.imgur.com/8kWtWaa.jpg
BITCOIN HASH RIBBON, one of the signals to determine when to buy. SMA30 (green line) falling below SMA60 (Blue line) indicates that some miners have closed down and stopped mining.




https://i.imgur.com/SNsIKKl.jpg
The sharp drop in Hash Rate shows that bitcoin mining is currently unprofitable.



https://i.imgur.com/Uu3LBBt.jpg

Bitfarms said it sold 3,000 Bitcoins, about 47% of the total bitcoin holdings of about 6,349 BTC, to liquidate loans previously used for mining investments.
source: https://decrypt.co/103539/public-bitcoin-miners-selling-btc-reserves-crypto-winter

while Marathon Digital announced they will not sell any bitcoin even though the market is going through bear season.
source: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/09/marathon-digital-bitcoin-production-weaker-than-hoped-in-may

If the market situation does not get better, unprofitable mining will force miners to increase the percentage of bitcoins sold out, which will contribute to the bitcoin price continuing to fall.

We are at the end of June, and how do you predict the market will be affected if in the future bitcoin miners will sell the bitcoins they mined?? Please share your thoughts.

6.25 a block x 2016blocks a fortnight x 2= 25200btc a month
selling 4000 is not the entire production

4000 coins entering an exchange compared to the 3MILLION+ coins held on exchange utxo's(hot/cold wallets) is not a big deal.

yes selling 4000coin in a small 1second/5 minute trade window can impact the market price alot. but thats just temporary price drama.

once those coins are sold. the miners dont have the coins. new buyers do.
new buyers then hold coins at their purchase price and wont sell for less. which then helps support current prices from dropping by as much again next time.

Without knowing a lot more detail about what was planned or many other things it's also all just guessing as to why.
Were they planning to sell 10000BTC for something anyway but because of the depressed market only sold 4000BTC just to cover some things?
We have what they say and what we speculate. But there are probably 1000s of factors going into those decisions.

-Dave
 

And this is incredible!
The coins sent to exchanges by miners reached a record high and the coin balance on exchanges is at all time lows for months now. You don't have to be a genius to notice that even when the inflows are rising the outflows are doing the same so there's a very high demand for bitcoin. Some people are buying it and moving offline, preparing to hold despite all that talk about recession and rate hikes all around the world.
Remember that when you get scared or have doubts about owning bitcoin.

Every investor who's saving up and has a portfolio should own at least 1% in bitcoin.

what is more interesting (unlike the temporary day to day drama of small amounts)_
.. is the yields of coins that are still hoarded at acquisition costs below market rate.

EG early adopter coins. mined coins from early days or by the most efficient miners.

..
take these things into account.
imagine early adopters and efficient miners early and current, that have a cost/acquisition value of under $15k
once they sell. to people on the market at $17k+ this year. those coins are no longer valued at below $15k but at a minimum $17k+
meaning no one now holding those sold coins would sell below $15k nor $17k..

..but if they were not sold this month by the early adopters/efficient miners. then next month there would have still have been more coins worth under $15k
meaning more coins that could have depressed the market later.

the more that are sold now means more support for higher prices later.

its better to "find the new bottom" now, as it then supports the next level higher later on.

2012 bottom was $3
2014 bottom was $300
2017 bottom was $1200
2020 bottom was $5300

Miners have small miners and whale miners. Whale miners probably act like whales but not all whales have same strategy and same risk management. They will response differently in bear market when their risk management will be tested.

Miners so far look like selling all Bitcoin they received recently but they still have some sort of reserved earnings from the past. They can sell it if the bear market last longer and price falls deeper. Then we will witness miner capitulations with which you will see miners not only sell their reserved Bitcoin but also will sell their ASICS at very big discount price too. At that point, their priority is exit the mining industry as soon as possible.

There are multiple huge mining farms so no, they are most likely not acting in unison as ‘the biggest whale’. If they were all dumping coins at the same time in agreement to affect the price you could say it but no. Mining farms have to make money to stay solvent so they are just doing what they have to do to survive.

Huge investments were into mining to take revenue. This is considered as a big business. Whales don't try to dump the market. They look for regular revenue, and they always want the revenue to be stable unlike the market variations. So, mostly they intend to hold than selling when the market is down. As a union they can be considered as Whale holders.

Mining may be the weakest link because of their constant need for liquidity, and therefore whales are better than miners because all they do is wait, enter and exit at the right time without risks.

The entirety of the remaining bitcoins will not cause a major problem, and the critical mass of bitcoins is not identifiable. If we suppose that we know the amount of ten million bitcoins, there are about 8 million unknown owners, and it cannot be certain that they are missing.

This may impact for short terms but in the long terms the market stables and it moves on with its own terms.

Is there any sequence in the numbers?

2012 to 2014 the percentage gain is super high, 2014 to 2017 is not much higher compering to the first but close to 2017 to 2020. It's 300 to 350% gain. From 2020 to current rate it's around $21000. We have under $18k few days ago. Shall we consider it as already a bottom?

I understand it does not make sense though 😂

The amount miners are earning in terms of fiat is down, and the cost of electricity and other energy is up, so it's hardly surprising that they are selling more bitcoin than before to cover their expenses. That's just basic math.

Well, that's just nonsense. Zoom out on the chart. The "sharp drop" in hash rate is taking us back to levels we haven't seen since... *checks notes* last month! 180 EH/s to 80 EH/s when China banned mining was a "sharp drop". 220 EH/s to 213 EH/s is barely a fluctuation. At the last retarget the difficult only dropped by 2%.

A small number of miners with the highest electricity costs have stopped mining at the moment, or maybe moved to some other coin, but to suggest mining is "currently unprofitable" is just nonsense. Even if it were, and we did actually see a sharp drop in hash rate, then the lower difficulty which accompanied that would then make mining profitable again. It's a self correcting system.

I wouldn't trust the Hash Ribbons indicator from LookIntoBitcoin. I'm not sure where they are getting their hash rate data from, but it's very different than the original indicator on trading view:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/09/10/mc2HH.png   https://s3.tradingview.com/snapshots/g/gaC3CkOF.png

As you can see, LIB indicator shows a bullish crossover with the MA30 and MA60, indicating hash rate recovery. While the original indicator shows nothing of the sort. I've otherwise been documenting the ongoing "miner capitulation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5402034.msg60432103#msg60432103)" for anyone interested. Currently the average mining cost (https://en.macromicro.me/charts/29435/bitcoin-production-total-cost) is back below current price, so hash rate remains relatively stable.

The capitulation signal is therefore based on lack of growth, rather than hash rate decline. The buy signal would otherwise arrive with a MA bullish crossover, as well as price returning to $30K. The fact that miners have been heavily dumping their coins I otherwise find a good thing, to me it means they don't have a backlog of coins to sell for further capitulation right now.

different miners have different plans
EG
the large corporate farms with efficient asics, in regions of cheap electric..
these guys are not going to switch off their asics first. they dont pander to the whims of daily market price. they can afford to continue mining. they have quarterly-yearly electric contracts so it actually makes them lose value by not using up their contract allotment of electric. their mining costs are low enough to make profit even at yearly ATL.. in short they dont stop mining
vs
hobby miners using residential electric paying a bill by the week/month at higher rates of $/kwh
these will watch the daily price changes and switch off when its not profitable. they would rather buy bitcoin when the price is lower because its cheaper to buy than mine it.

EG
(not using accurate/researched numbers. just giving a random number demonstration of a idea)
those that hoard coins over 6-8 years.
in the last 8 years of asic mining. imagine that pools gave out 88.5% of what they mine the same month of mining(to their pool users and to cover costs), and hoarded the rest for years
(the 7mill coins mined in that time/11.5%(11.428%) is 800k hoarded)

now using loose rounded dates and numbers since mining pools really began properly
now imagine that in the 2014-2016 (2 year)period 2.625m coins were mined. meaning ~300k hoarded at $250-$1.2k
now imagine that in the 2016-2020 (4year)period 2.625m coins were mined. meaning ~300k hoarded at $400-$40k
now imagine that in the 2020-2022 (2 year)period 1.3125m coins were mined. meaning ~150k hoarded at $17k-$70k

these miners are not selling the 2020-22 batch which cost them high prices to mine. they are selling coins within the first season batch costing them only a couple hundred-thousand

VS

hobby minders that have sold on speculation each year. paniced at crashes. and only have coins held from the last couple years. meaning they are at risk of selling at a loss
hobby miners that usually mine just to pay their electric bill and cut off mining as soon as the price goes below their mining cost

with that said, as mentioned in other post.
...
changing of the "realised value" coins of 2014-2016 from being valued at $250-$1.2k to now have those same taint coins realised value as $17k+ is better for all

Since you seem like an expert about BTC miners here, do you think the recent amount of heavy dump from miners has anything to do with the Ukraine-Russia war? Cause from what information I know, a lot of BTC mining farms were in Ukraine because of the cheap price of electricity. Then bam, the war forced those miners hastily sell their bags to bail out because of the disruption in business, have pay back loans.
I also agree with your assessment, less amount of BTC in miners' bags is a good thing.

I agree. Just because we have seen some selling patterns due to the cost of energy and the price of Bitcoin, doesn't mean they act to one. It is a logical consequence to pay their operation costs and not all miners have the same financial health. Those with a high level of debt will be forced to sell. Those with better financial health will be able to keep some of these cheap Bitcoins for the long term.

With the following happenings with the current market, I will not be surprised with the price if it goes even lower. I mean, it will inevitably be called the crypto winter again. It's just going to be like that continuously. If you had predicted that the market would fall slowly last year, you would've made more money. So now, it could be happening again. I think it can happen with the miners being backed on the corner.

I hope that most of the miners now have switched to renewable energy resources so that they would have been able to be more profitable in their investments.

A whale is an individual or a single entity that holds a large amount of bitcoin not multiple people holding a sum total of bitcoin. Saying miners are the biggest whales is like saying users on bitcointalk combined are the biggest whale!

The real question that nobody can answer is how many individuals are holding this sum of 800k bitcoins. For example if there are a million miners that means each of them own a fraction of bitcoin and that doesn't make them whales.

I disagree. You can't compare a company with individuals. An individual doesn't need to always sell their bitcoin to cover the bills, they also don't have employees to pay a salary to.

This statement is wrong for 2 reasons.
1. Every coin sold on an exchange is a coin bought by another person. That means the number of bitcoins continuously bought and withdrawn from exchanges is also at an all time high.
2. Other reports from the blockchain analyzers have been saying that the amount of bitcoin stored on exchanges has been decreasing!

First of all, nobody should use hashrate to decide whether they should buy bitcoin or not! That makes no sense at all because hashrate reacts to the past price with a big delay not to the future possibility of price.
Secondly hashrate set a new ATH during this big market crash and the average hashrate over the past 3 months is pretty much around 200 EHS which shows that mining bitcoin is still very profitable.

The swings you see in hashrate are normal and currently the main reason for them is the increasing cost of energy in certain countries which translates into the miners in those countries shutting down or migrating to other regions that still have cheap energy.

Is this the same MARA pool that has been censoring transactions and going against Bitcoin's ethos? LOL

During all market crashes people from different groups are selling their bitcoins. This is nothing new to say miners have sold their coins!
There is also people from different categories who are buying bitcoin. If you look at the number of addresses with a balance you can see how it is rapidly increasing which shows the increasing number of people who are buying bitcoin.

In short the market moves based on a lot of factors, miners selling their coins is a very small one among them.

When was the last time a singular whale movement (whether from individual or entity like this vague "miner" exchange transaction) actually moved the market on its own and proceeded to maintain its impact? There's all those Whalebot Twitter accounts bleating out these huge signals but they're just noise -- buying and selling cancelling each other out.

Think what pooya said is right (simplistic but correct): if you're sending out more coins to an exchange, the orderbook fattens, more people can buy at better prices, so record sales is also record buys. And if, indeed, orderbooks are thinning as reported (exchange coins low), then we've got more buyers than sellers. Sounds good to me.

Nope, I sold only 10% of my mined coins in May.  ;D

LE:
~
Removing this as I was mistaken it with the price, my bad, the second part stays.

The only indicator you have is the hashrate and the difficulty:
https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator
The last adjustment was -2.3548%, current estimation is between -2.3096% and -1.2486%,  the swings are on the same levels as March.


Triple nope!
Bitcoin mining is not some unilateral production where the cost is the same for everyone and you have offer and demand.
The moment somebody drops out of mining the revenue of the others is growing, without further costs, mining will never be unprofitable for everyone!
Even at 10k or 5k, there will still be miners making a profit even at those levels.

Fourth:
Profitability hasn't reached yet bottom, lowest was 6.5 cents per Th/s back in 2020, viabtc is showing right now 8.8 cents Th/s not even mentioning the difference in efficiency between mining gear generations thus lower consumption per Th/s.

The SMA30 and SMA60 on the 3rd chart in the OP are the moving averages for hashrate, not for price. His argument seems to be that since the 30 day hashrate moving average has dropped below the 60 day hashrate moving average, that the hashrate is falling. Which is partly true as hashrate is down marginally over the last few weeks, but we are talking in the region of a few percent as you point out, and certainly not a crash as he is suggesting.

I think the majority of the big farms have done already and the big ones who want to stay alive in this game are forced to do so or otherwise they will have to go offline during the upcoming crypto winter.

Miners are not acting as the biggest whale,they are just selling the coins they mine to be able to pay rent and energy consumption,the big mining farms who are still on non renewable energy.If they fail to move to solar panels for example they will be having a hard time with the energy prices skyrocketing throughout the world so they are not the whales,just selling to keep their activity ongoing.

My bad, I saw the first line which mentioned when to buy, and coming from another speculation thread with the same moving average I thought it was about the price hitting those, not the hashrate. Of course, for this he is quite right, the hashrate is far more linear than the price and far more unidirectional, if the shorter term period is lower than the longer one it's obviously a downtrend.
But again, it doesn't mean much, a single huge farm going through a period of refining or maintenance could be the cause for half of those 1% swings.


Yeah right, like everyone wants to pay millions for batteries and going solar rather than pay 2cents per kWh for coal-generated energy.
That's why we have tens of farms on coal and gas and a big zero on full solar not grid-tied, so no, no majority has done anything like this.

I think many people would like to believe so, because they are in fear that bitcoin will be banned because of the impact on the envoirment. But I think the more honest answer is that miners will use the energy that they can get for the cheapest price. So if you can set up your miners next to a solar farm and can get cheap energy it makes sense, but the same goes for mining next to a coal power plant. So I think it all depends on how prices for energy will be in the future.

Well for starters, I'm no expert. I've simply studied the original hash ribbons indicator (https://www.tradingview.com/script/kT7jIvqv-Hash-Ribbons/) since 2019. I otherwise don't think this has anything directly to do with the Ukraine-Russia war no.

There might be a lot of mining farms in Ukraine, but in comparison to the rest of the network, I imagine it's negligible. Miners, along with whales, have a habbit of dumping big bags near the lows (I saw a graph recently confirming this, but unfortunately can't find it for reference sake). It is probably to do with loans and bad business models though, as I've seen mentioned elsewhere. Whereas miners who can't turn a profit should simply be switching off and waiting for price to recover, if they have outstanding loans (which they dependant on mining to pay), then no doubt they will have to dump their bags (even at a loss). That's my assumption anyway, giving how over-leveraged and over-collateralized the market has been in recent months.


To clarify, this MA crossover doesn't imply hash rate is falling, but simply that the average hash rate over the past 2 months is higher than the average of the past month. The MA30 has been falling for over a month now, even with hash rate making a new ATH during this period. As I've referenced elsewhere (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg60328478#msg60328478), this "capitulation" signal can appear from stagnation of growth, such as what happened three times in 2020.


Agree. The fact that price fell below the average mining cost @ $30K in mid-May, but now has reduced to $20K (while price is above it), means that so far the network is balancing itself against price quite nicely. The capitulation event occurs when price drops below average mining cost and fails to recover, either with the average coming back down to the price, or the price coming back to the average.

By Miners I do think they mean by the Big companies that hold most of the hash rate the reason for less individual miners are varied from :

Extremely expensive license to A lot of Competition in the market but at the end of the day if they are big bitcoin mining companies they can 'choose' which ones they wanna mine and even hold a considerable amount since they are already in this sector and behind these companies are already the very rich whales, so what do you know ? No idea how this is all connected but at the end of the day I do think that it's extremely relative and one cannot trust the percentage off the internet.

I don't think miners have that much of an impact. As mentioned, it can cause price volatility in bulk sales, but when viewed from a broad perspective, the effect is very small. The market has its own speculators, and everything in the global economy now affects Bitcoin as well. There is no longer a market in the hands of a few groups as before. It's a trillion dollar industry. Isn't that one of the purposes of Bitcoin? A more distributed economy that small groups cannot control. I don't think the miners will sell at a loss either. The dramatic drop in price may only be momentary. I don't think all miners think and act the same way, so that doesn't make them the biggest whale.

Sure, if miners sell all the bitcoin they get it will flood the market and cause prices to fall more and more, but I expect there is a limit they will stop at if they keep selling and the price continues to drop they will reach the point where the price of bitcoin is less than the cost of production Therefore, they will be losers and will stop selling in this case, they are forced in such cases to hold the bitcoin for a period of time until prices improve and get their profits, otherwise they will stop mining and sell their hardware.

Atleast for that reason the miners won't disturb the market with large scale selling. If I'm not wrong after the bullish market of 2017 the miners haven't experienced such a situation of bitcoin and ethereum valued less than the cost of production. Prior to the 2017 bull market the price wasn't that big and the power requirements were high. Nowadays energy efficient mining equipments too support good in the low cost production.

I don't think the miners are acting as the biggest whale and instead are reacting to market conditions.  I'm sure they didn't want to sell massive amounts at the low, but were forced to in order to ensure they could keep the lights on going forward.  Seems reactionary to me.  If they were acting as the biggest whale, you wouldn't have seen them selling the bottom and they would have instead been buying it.  The actual whale is the guy who was selling at $65K and buying at $17K, which I believe was just about the opposite of what miners have been doing.

Whoops good one my bro doing the math  8)

---

besides that, the miner or the news-called whale might only sell their portion of crypto to keep their mining industry running. and if you can see the new miner always drove the bitcoin hashrate and difficulty UP. if they want to destroy the entire crypto market is like they want to destroy their mining industry the logic is like that right. and those chart is act as one miner in the world not single entity right so we can judge them by only the chart

As a whole, miners can be acting as whales and can therefore be influencing the price direction of Bitcoin in the market. However, we have to note that we are talking here of miners from different geographic location and so many of them are doing business without necessary being connected with other miners and so yeah they are doing their business as standalone...so they can be acting differently under many circumstances. And because they are doing business, it is just natural that miners can be selling the coins they mined from time to time...nobody can stop them from doing so.