With the recent dip in Bitcoin prices, the mining difficulty of the original cryptocurrency has hit the lowest point since December 2018.
The mining difficulty of Bitcoin dropped by seven percent on Monday, and according to Alistair Milne, the chief investment officer at Altana Digital Currency Fund, miners can break even at an average price of $8,000 apiece.
Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped the most since Dec 2018 after the last adjustment on 8th Nov 2019 (-7%)
... seems to confirm the cost of mining (on average) is ~$8000 https://t.co/vKiJgaxzZh — Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) November 11, 2019
The mining difficulty is often determined by the associated Hash Rate of the network and the market price of the digital currency. A higher hashrate and a lower price will result in losses to the miners, considering the massive associated electricity cost for crypto mining.
The incoming of ASICs
Just after the launch of Bitcoin, it could be mined on a laptop with decent processing power. However, as the price of the digital currency soared, big players dived into the mining industry with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).
This dramatically increased the hashrate of mining Bitcoin, which went up from 5.1 trillion in December 2018 to 13.7 trillion, as of press time. The hashrates followed the price of Bitcoin, which spiked from $3,500 at the end of last year to the current price of above $8,600.
“In my (subjective) opinion those chances of succeeding are at least 50%. If Bitcoin does succeed, 1 Bitcoin may be worth more than $1 million in 7 to 10 years. That is 250 times what it is worth today (at the time of writing the price of Bitcoin is ~ $4,000),” Wences Casares, CEO of Xapo, explained earlier.
Meanwhile, Bitmain, the largest crypto mining hardware maker, is introducing new efficient miners in the market constantly and is also attempting to list its shares in the United States.
