Revenues earned by Bitcoin (BTC) miners during the last six months of the year 2018 have already outshone the results from the previous year, but the miners themselves are seeing very little profit in this activity, as reported by the weekly crypto news and media outlet Diar on 8th October Monday.
According to the report issued by Diar, the profits and costs have already touched $4.7 billion in the initial three quarters of the present year, which is almost $1.4 billion more than profits made during the entire year 2017. According to Diar miners still attain 54,000 Bitcoin each month.
However the current scenario is gradually becoming suitable to the bigger and more established crypto miners since electricity prices are always on the rise. The assessments made by Diar clearly show that the crypto miners who pay retail electricity prices have now started facing declines in profits for the first time this year in September.
The Diar report notes,
Bitcoin mining has, at least for now, and most likely in the future, moved into the court of bigger players with deep pockets.
Moreover the cryptocurrency market’s fall has even led to the latest crypto mining machines to fail to generate profits for their operators, as suggested by the real-time information provided by the mining profitability data website ASICMinerValue.com (AMV) on December 11.
ASICMinerValue is a website that determines the real-time profitability rates for “ASIC” miners, which is known as the hardware that utilizes the Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips. The ASIC miner hardware is specifically customized to effectively mine cryptocurrency which is based on a specific hashing algorithm. The website is update constantly and it estimates the profit turnovers for specific miners based on the present power costs, block rewards, network difficulty and cryptocurrency prices.
The site currently shows that as of now among the ASIC cryptocurrency mining machines, which are built to mine coins that are developed on cryptographic hash function namely “SHA-256” like the Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), only two machines are proving to be somewhat profitable. Both of these ASIC mining models were presented for use in October 2018, and now show $0.58 and $0.21 as profits per day.
The ASIC machine that is giving the most profit the Ebit 11+ which was developed by Ebang Communication, a Chinese mining hardware manufacturer, and the machines is now valued at more than two thousand U.S. dollars. According to reports from this week the mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain has declared that it will be terminating its development center in Israel and would dismiss all of its local employees. The local reports suggested that the decision was taken due the significant fall in the world wide crypto market and the stir it caused among several crypto circles. The local reports came from an Israeli business news outlet named Globes which published the news on Monday December 10.
BItmain’s center in Israel was set up in the year 2016 in order to survey the applications and uses of blockchain technology, work on the Connect BTC mining pool, and develop the framework which forms the basis of Bitmain’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) project named Sophon. Bitmain’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) will also be closing this week. All of the 23 employees are lined up to be dismissed during this week after the center shuts down.
The head of the Israeli center of Bitmain who is also the Vice President of the international sales and marketing at Bitmain, Gadi Glikberg, will also be leaving his position and role at the Bitmain center in Israel. Israeli business news outlet Globes reported that Glikberg also attributed the closing down of the center to the recent collapse of the cryptocurrency market. He stated that,
The crypto market has undergone a shake-up in the past few months, which has forced Bitmain to examine its various activities around the globe and to refocus its business in accordance with the current situation.
A bear crypto market which has been around for one year now has appeared to have very adverse effects on the profits that miners earned through crypto mining. Despite all this Bitcoin miners still managed to collect $4.7 billion in profits during the first six months this year. A constantly increasing competition between established mining pools and the growing difficulty of Bitcoin’s algorithm has made getting the same cryptocurrency very tough and less profitable with the odds set against smaller players.
