Bitcoin Forum

Miners did lower hashrate when 1 Bitcoin < $300, see chart

Apparantly, miners do adjust operational expense depending on Bitcoin commercial price.

https://i.imgur.com/TNpKqIR.png

It's logical that they do so when prices fall steeply but surprisingly appears to have rarely happened so far. Would be curious to know if there have been other stretches when the hash rate dropped.

I know personally I decided to sell my 2x s1's when btc dropped - why keep mining when I'm spending 2x what im making in just energy. It may be good if btc sits around 300 so that the difficulty stops climbing so dam fast.

Well that's exactly what's supposed to happen, isn't it?

Everytime a newbie says something like
"Bitcoin is doomed if the price drops too much",
people are quick to explain the hashrate would
drop out of competitiveness to find a new
equalibrium.

Well, if that just happened, then it is proof
the theory is correct.

The lowering of the hashrate is the problem. The lower the hashrate, the cheaper it is to attack Bitcoin.

Correct me if I'm wrong, it will only decrease linearly, not exponentially (unless of course price does the same).

Correct. To successfully attack bitcoin the hashrate would need to go back down to 2010 levels. Not going to happen, ever.

Hashrate went up even if for very little. And as it seems it will go up again.
What you are seeing in those charts is variance and not chinese people plugging and unplugging their equipment in real time  ::)

Well that is how the market works out brother ! There are some logical explanations and some illogical actions that just get you the result !!  :)

may be the profit was low with their miners.

That makes total sense, when mining costs exceed your income it's better to shut down your miners.
Strangely miners didn't seem to react to price swings before. Hashrate and diff was constantly growing, while price was going up and down.

Although it might have just been a case of power failure in some big mining farm  :)

But lower is the price of Bitcoin, less is worth getting attacked.

Imagine you're the powerful miner interested only in profit. Suddenly the BTC price drops significantly. You switched off your miner to avoid generating losses. So did the other 'professional' miners.

Now, if you have enough power, you can just switch it back on and attempt a massive double-spend. Doesn't matter if the bitcoin is only $100 if you could double spend thousands.

Threat is real and possible. Luckily not very likely. Lower the hash rate = lower difficulty, so it becomes more profitable again, therefore miners would be switching back on again.

Why are people so surprised, this is very normal as people will temporarily turn off their hardware.

It will go up again for sure, that's how it works  :) Miners would love to see the difficulty drop more often.

It was quite normal, as expected.

If the big mining farms mines enough bitcoin to cover it cost, they can continue to keep on the hardware.  They know bitcoin price is volatile, the price will bounce back even climb to several times in the future. They can keep the mined bitcoin and convert to cash in the future. 

OP must be drunk. the days leading upto the under $299 price, i see a hash rise..

look at the chart again.. look at the date 25th september.

the price starts a constant down motion.. but the hasrate starting at 225peta, is in a constant up motion right the way over 300peta.

it is only then that the small shrimp that are instantly cashing out (non bitcoin investors) stop hashing because they are not getting enough fiat to pay their electric, so they stop mining, and as such stop cashing out. which is where we see the 20%-25% drop in hash power.


to me the big whales, mining farms and investors carry on, but there is a small quarter of the mining community that are not smart and are cashing out as soon as they can.

this 25% of the mining community are not bitcoin investors, but they are most certainly electric company investors as the only thing they have left in their hands is a "paid in full" electric bill.. but no fiat, no bitcoins.

im kind of glad they gave up as it gives more of a slice of the pie to true bitcoin miners/investors, whom by holding ot and not cashing out show their true belief in bitcoin for its long term prospective.

if any one thinks that mining should be used to feed your FIAT lives of this week, and not enrich your future lives.. you wont last long in the mining world

Huh? Where did you pull that number/year from? Care to share your calculations?

Some mining pools have shut down since btc price decrease to $450

Coincidence that the hashrate dropped when marshals raided BFL, so perhaps their customer rig "testing" mining farm went offline?

This is very well possible. The FTC however alleges that BFL "only" tested customer miners for two days prior to shipping so based on this the BFL farm should not have been that large. (I do suspect that the actual testing period could be accurately measured in months).

The miners do not actually lower the difficulty, they can only take mining capacity offline which will cause it to take longer for blocks to be found which will generally cause the difficulty to increase (assuming the lower hashrate is low enough to it take more then 2 weeks to find 2016 blocks)

The difficulty will likely track the median price of electricity and the price of bitcoin, at least over the long term (and when the difficulty gets to a high enough of a rate)

So some mining pools are closing right? Is there new mining pools too?

Cryptsy is about to launch Mintsy, not sure whether they'll do it as a new, separate pool or partner up with some existing one.

http://www.mintsy.co/ (http://www.mintsy.co/)

Did i interpret wrongly or am i seeing other things which you guys see differently? While the green line dips the red line which supposed to represent the hash rate is still moving upwards. It shows that it is still profitable to continue mining in certain parts of the world where cost of electricity, hardware are cheap

it was interesting to see anomaly chart like that :D
hashrate usually dip or crash when bitcoin prices crash too
but this one is different. did they just keep bitcoin from mining and sell it at the right price (when the price up)?
too risky movement i think

A lot of small home miner hit break-even and shut down, I believe thats what causes the lower hashrate...