Over the past two weeks, the Bitcoin hash rate has almost halved, dropping from a high of almost 62 million TH/s on the 27th of August to a low of $34 million TH/s two days ago.
As the cryptocurrency market value fell this week, miners around the world began switching off their hardware in order to mitigate losses from reduced mining rewards. Chun Wang, the co-founder of Chinese mining pool F2Pool, says the company has had to switch off thousands of their machines.
A tweet from Chinese blockchain reporter cnLedger shows a video of a man dumping asics machines in a huge pile, with the tagline:
“The time to buy is when there’re miners in the streets.”
Despite the catastrophic crash that wiped almost $80 billion from the market this month, crypto assets have started to show signs of improvement. Bitcoin continues to maintain strong support above $4,200 since yesterday, with a 3 percent increase today up to $4,338. Ethereum (ETH) is up 5 percent after suffering some of the worst losses this week, and even war-torn Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is up 1 percent.
While the decline has no doubt cost miners thousands of dollars in lost revenue, as the hash rate declines the ability to earn rewards will improve, and miners will eventually switch back on. The reduced hash rate could also provide an opportunity for smaller mining operations to get a foot into a market which has recently become heavily centralized and monopolized.
