Bitcoin Forum

Miners are moving unusually large amounts of BTC(Almost 1,500 BTC) since 2 days ago. Poolin, Slush, F2Pool, HaoBTC, etc. have taken the bitcoins out of the mining wallets for a week and sent some to the exchange.

Data source: https://twitter.com/CryptoQuant_com

Saw this. I don't get it. If you're a miner you could easily get rid of everything OTC. Your 'virgin' coins will be highly sought by people who are turned on by that type of thing and they ain't making all that many these days. Maybe these are all small fry.

It's probably a move to manipulate and move the markets. Miners dumping is the oldest FUD in the book, and in the age of Whale Alert, the news would be expected to be disseminated and absorbed quickly by the markets. Their dumps also go a lot further (in terms of moving the price) on exchanges than OTC markets.

There has been a lot of talk of "price wars" between Chinese miners and the rest of the world, with Chinese miners preferring lower prices because it gives them an edge over newer Western miners in profitability. The higher the price goes, the more Western miners will continue coming online.

Right, and that's one negative effect of this so called whale alerts, everything is out in the open and it just magnified how this whales or manipulators play the market, this time, is the miners.

Haven't heard of this one, so there's really a competition behind this miners from behind and Chinese miners wanted to remain dominant, specially that there are a lot of news recently about some big companies getting in the mining picture and this is a threat to Chinese miners.

There's always a competition when the number of miners going online increases. And indeed Chinese miners want Bitcoin not to make a rally yet. So, I guess this selling was made for this purpose. Though miners had different preferences, I guess majority of the miners are encouraged when theres a bull run, and some miners doesn't want a bull run to minimize the competition.
Nevertheless, this is a good opportunity to buy at a lower price for the investors if this mining war continues.

Considering gas prices on the Ethereum network, Ethereum miners earn a lot more than Bitcoin miners. In addition, after the last Bitcoin halving, not only did the remuneration halve, but also the requirements for mining equipment increased, and many Miners had a lot of problems related to the profitability of their activities.

That isn't an exit of miners, they are giving us an opportunity to accumulate more Bitcoin during this dump.

I can't imagine that miners are also a manipulator of the price of Bitcoin in the market. By moving this large transaction in the market it seems there is a good purpose. It might be investment again or planning to build other facilities of mining for the equipment.

But as you can see, they aren't only the possible factor of dumping the price. We have seen there is another angle of reason, the stablecoins like USDT are reserve indicates the potential buying pressure that makes price drastically down by the correction. Then, I don't think so this is an exit movement of Bitcoin miners.

The Chinese miners want the price low so the miners from other countries like from US are going to quit when the returns are not enough to pay their energy bills?

That is very strategic of them actually but then so are they, they are also going to lose profit if they sell for low price. That isn't also good for them. The accumulation of many traders is more reasonable.

Yep, this is one article that touches on it:


https://decrypt.co/27777/bitcoin-halving-could-bring-way-more-mining-back-to-north-america

One of the big issues is scale and capitalization. Retail miners in the West are easily squeezed by price volatility.

The northern US and Canada are well positioned for large scale Bitcoin mining operations due to cheap electricity and very cold, long winters. Miners can sell excess generated heat at scale to reduce costs. By co-locating operations adjacent to power plants and either generating power themselves or load balancing, mining in North America can absolutely compete with China. All that is needed is the proper infrastructural investment, and the proper capitalization and/or mining insurance to ride out price volatility. This will all take years to happen as Bitcoin mining gradually becomes viewed as more than just a super high risk venture, but I'm confident 10-20 years from now the global hash rate distribution will look very, very different.

It's also likely that the miners saw the current bitcoin price as suitable to offload their bitcoin stash as they prepare for a possible bull or bear market in the near future. Remember it has been months before bitcoin price some high levels. That plus the bitcoin halving where miner's reward was reduced. I am certain most of the miners were affect and would like to enjoy some of their harvest.

I don't think 1,500 BTC (~$15M) is so much that it can shake up the bitcoin price.

Now Miners are not holding btc  anymore. This will not really affect price of btc as I've think . I expect price or Ethereum to be more affected because miners are earning more than expected amount daily and they will need to sell..

Obviously, their move has drastically affected the market in the last couple of days. But going back in history this is not the first time they've done this, I think even prior the the halving, big mining pools has slowly flushing out majority of their bitcoin to buy new gear, and then mid to small miners dumping because they are moving out.

It's not that obvious though, as there are speculators buying because of FOMO of the pre-halving. But today, it seems the picture is very clear, no buyers but pure dumping from big miners. And they have another intentions, to curb out Western miners who just enter the picture after the halving. It is good for Western miners, no, but for investors, golden opportunity again if the price slides into four digits.

Would it actually make sense for miners to want the prices to drop though? Because if anything, they're going to make more money from mining if bitcoin goes higher, rather than the other way around. Well, unless some of these miners are also actively trying to actually buy cheaper bitcoin.

Woha, I am pretty sure it's not small fry brother. Such big transfer and that too from different mining vendors can bring up substantial change in the market. Well, just look at the thread replies and fear starts to filling up in the market.

This news on the telecaster booth can cause huge chaos considering it will impact on larger group of investors.

Also, it could be just normal transfer, and why wouldn't they do it if they have earned it. :)

Would it actually make sense for miners to send those coins to exchanges otherwise? A miner could easily liquidate OTC (most likely with a price premium) with just a small fraction of those coins. Why dump them onto thin exchange order books if they wanted the price to go up?

I believe that miners tired to keep as much coins as possible to keep the profits higher, they really wanted to live without spending all the extra coins they saved, just mine coins right now and sell those if you have to and keep whatever you can save and move on like that.

However with transaction fee's going lower and with halving they are not making any profit at all, some machines do but some machines really started to lose money or make very tiny amounts, which means they were really not doing well. So, what could they do instead? Sell all the coins they saved so far, whatever the cost was they sold it already before and whatever the extra was they kept it but it was until now, they now need to sell to continue operation. Obviously not something they wanted but had to.

This explains why bitcoin price suddenly dropped by ~2k $ during the past few days.
I think exstasie's theory is the most reasonable one. If mining in China costs less than other countries then Chinese miners can handle this price drop till they get rid of their competitors.
Not sure how long this war will last but it looks like the market is beginning to recover.

Sweet amount. Yeah, this might be the reason why we've turned into a sudden correction. I don't see it as an exit though, it's just a normal day for those miners to take profits as they've accumulated since the halving was done and rewards by that time were cut off.

They pretty got a decent price to sell it. IMHO. It's not just all about selling, they probably have to take it in cash to sustain their operation and other expenses maintaining their farms.

Whole crypto market is in red due to the exit scam of some defi projects which creates a panic and made the people to liquidate their funds into cash because whenever there is a hack or major scam the market will get shaky for a while but after a while when everything getting back into normal the price will get expensive so make use of the current cheap price to get some bitcoins.

Hopefully it will be quick onetime thing and not a long term idea for them. I mean surely they could make a lot more profit if they just keep it and not sell the excess they have. Miners do have a cost when they mine, I understand that and I accept that but that really doesn't mean that they have to sell all the bitcoin they mine, they could only sell the bitcoins they need to sell to cover the cost and that would be enough, whatever is left over after the cost they could keep.

If they do not do that and if they keep on trying to sell every single one, there is really not much that we could do, it would really hurt bitcoin price and there is really a big fall coming back to back, it is going to hurt the crypto economy. Hopefully they will stop and not do that.

I don't think this is their long term plan, to sell all their coins. What will be their gain on this move? If they will continue to mine btc, I don't think it is in their best interest to continue selling. Let's wait for the next coming weeks and see if they are still on this action. I am not seeing valid reason why will they totally exit in the mining business after all these years, and struggles encountered by btc.

As far as selling? @exstasie, has a good explanation in page 1.

Of course, this is just short term as they can't really continue to sell their precious bitcoin and it will come on a point wherein they have to stop and then hold. Everything here is cyclical, and that's the (beauty) economics of the whole bitcoin system. Everyone is involved, miners, traders, long term holders, exchanges. You might not see a valid reason on your viewpoint, but everyone here has a reason to sell that will somehow affect the market.

maybe it is time they sell off and get back the capital they invested a long time in the mining machines. These are also the cases that often happen and I don't think it has too much impact on Bitcoin's future price. you know, when the mining power of the machines is halved, the scarcity will increase, the demand will be higher and we will see Bitcoin break ATH soon next year. Don't be alarmed by such sell-offs, the long-term future is still very good. Very good time to invest from now on.

Miners are not people who have a distain for bitcoin, on contrary they are people who loves bitcoin and very much involved with it, they are people who have the most riding bitcoins price and they really love it; which means they can't just continue to sell, they do not want to part with their coins because they love it so much, which means the biggest whales of bitcoin mining world wants to have as much bitcoin as they can, obviously it is right that they will have to sell some time to time but not always and they will want to keep most of it if they can afford to.

This means this was definitely a short term thing and it will stop. At that point you will see that there are less sellers in the crypto world and the price will react to that and will go up once again.

They are just playing it safe but I'm not sure how people understand it.
Miners could freely do anything that they want but somehow we mistakenly understand it and put them in question. Anyway, if they are still making good in mining, I believe also that they have a reason also why they have to transfer their funds to exchanges and converted it to stable coins, which might be a big option since the market is so volatile.

Well, I don't dig deeper into what is their plan and why they are doing that. With this free market, we are entitled to make a change and prepared for the incoming.

Obviously, that's there where they got their money/profit from, but they have to do, what they have to do in order survived in this game long term, that is sell some of their holdings. Maybe to reinvest on mining hardware again in order to make more profit.


Yes, the effect will definitely be short term and they will have to stop offloading at some point then continue to accumulate again.

The community is not very familiar or not used to miners dumping huge amount of coins in the market, so when this happens the majority of people are caught by surprised, because of the dumps or drops many newbies or weak hands follow the trend and dump their shares, in the future maybe next week or next month this scenario could happen again.

In fact it is very difficult to understand how the mine will affect the market but even if the market is dumped it will rise a lot over time. At the same time the risks should not be forgotten as they also increase proportionately. always act wisely and control potential damage controlling the share of currencies does not last long but in the case of long-term investments the form of mining changes.

This is not surprising. Often times miners will sell their shares also to any exchanges. What it caught to OP is that they are moving a huge amount of Bitcoin, and this might something it leads to declining sentiments if they will dump it. Well, it is not sure how it affects the market because even whales do this thing, the market price isn't moving that way instead of seeing it on the opposite drive.
Not a simple case to influence the market and this is not enough, though.

Nothing wrong with questioning everything, but I think sometimes people read too much into what miners do (or don't do). I think a lot of what we think we know about miners and mining is wrong. It probably doesn't cost as much as we think, for example, mainly due to state subsidies and other kickbacks and merged mining few people count. Things like that.

Plus this is good for the issuance of the cryptocurrency. We don't want miners to HODL everything in their wallets, it would cause more centralization issues in Bitcoin.

Dumping coins is not really something we should be scared off for the long term, obviously it is going to hurt bitcoin in the short term because it drops the price but in the long term if they keep dumping all they have and all they make they can't just make a profit forever, they will eventually stop because they do not have all the coins in the world, which means they are going to stay at a level and can't sell more, when that level is reached and they fail to sell more that means we will find a level where buyers will have to go above, if buyers go above that level miners will not be able to match that and price will keep going up even when they keep selling.

This is what they wanted probably, they wanted to show buyers how much they would have to spend to keep it going up.

This could also be a threat, or at least to show the world that they are still strong. We all know miners are not as strong as they think they are, they wanted to change all of bitcoins blockchain system to allow miners to make more profit while making things faster, I do not remember the method but they really wanted to make more money and change blockchain for it but they failed and miserably at that, not even close, which they had to move towards bitcoin cash and they did made a ton of money thanks to that.

Now this could be something similar, to say to us that they may have lost a big income because of halving and that is why they made the fee's a lot bigger but they are still not gone, that they are still there as a powerful party and could ruin the price when they want.