Things are looking dire.
Mine Time
It's not a great time to mine Bitcoin.
As Coindesk reports, an analysis from JPMorgan found that the computational power required to mine the elite cryptocurrency has outpaced its value thanks to investors chasing artificial intelligence gains and abandoning crypto in the process.
The result: Bitcoin mining profitability is at an all-time low, and it remains to be seen whether or not it will keep going lower.
The crux of these findings centers on what is known as the "hashrate," which in the crypto world is the computing power required to mine a given currency.
In proof-of-work currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, miners must use increasingly huge amounts of computing power to rapidly guess the lengthy hash codes associated with each coin, and once they do, they're rewarded with a newly minted coin.
After the value of Bitcoin fell this summer, the hashrate rose enough that by August the more than 18 million listed miners in the United States recorded an 18 percent market cap loss.
Essentially, just as miners were feeling the burn, the price of the elite cryptocurrency fell, making the situation all the worse.
Not Worth It
As Coindesk notes, Bitcoin's mining profitability has steadily fallen since this year's halving event, which cut the value of each coin in half per its four-year schedule to maintain scarcity and fight inflation.
In fact, Bitcoin's hashprice, which measures mining profitability, was 30 percent lower than it was in December 2022, and 40 percent lower than it was pre-halving.
With reports that the International Monetary Fund is looking into raising the cost of crypto mining electricity by up to 85 percent to deter people from engaging in the massively energy-intensive and polluting endeavor, it seems like it's never been a worse time to be a Bitcoin miner.
Whether Bitcoin bros will take this state of affairs as anything but a sign of a future surge, however, remains anyone's guess.
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