By Landon Manning
Now that the former global Bitcoin ( BTC ) mining epicenter, China, has cracked down on the cryptocurrency industry, U.S.-based firms have taken the limelight in this lucrative industry, seeing it rise to new heights of profitability.
The world of bitcoin mining has, much like the entire cryptocurrency space, seen some very dramatic rises and falls over the years since the release of Bitcoin more than a decade ago.However, according to recently published data from The Block , the month of October 2021 has been particularly noteworthy.The year has been a momentous one across the entire crypto space, and the revenue of bitcoin miners specifically hit an all-time high around March of this year.
This high was short-lived, however, plunging to nearly half of that figure by June, but it stayed much higher than it had been in years previous.With this all-time high set at $1.75 billion in mining revenue, it’s noteworthy that the mining community has been on a trajectory of steady growth upward for a while now, with the monthly revenue of all bitcoin mining in October hitting $1.72 billion.This is not quite the previous summit, but it is close enough to indicate that the industry’s upward trend only needs to continue by the barest of margins for this revenue to eclipse new records.
Several components have gone into this meteoric rise for bitcoin miners, not least of which is all of the new market share that has opened up in the last several months.Although the People’s Republic of China had held the number-one spot in terms of volume of cryptocurrency mined, and by a wide margin at that, the government’s crackdown on the entire industry in September left a vast hole in the international space.
Now, it seems clear that miners based in the United States have taken on this mantle for themselves, with more than one third of all computing power dedicated to Bitcoin mining worldwide coming from miners in this country.This is a far head of previous records for U.S.mining firms, especially now that there is no single competitor with the market dominance possessed by China.
This reduction in miners has caused Bitcoin’s overall hash rate to decrease, although the increased activity from miners worldwide has been doing much to recover the slack.
In the meantime, this lack of pressure on the network, this increased ease of actually minting new bitcoin, has had a substantial impact on some of the biggest new players.The six biggest U.S.mining firms by market capitalization have collectively mined 155% more in Q3 than they did in Q1 of 2021, and the current hash rate for firms in this country could reach as high as 40% of the entire network: near the 50% or 60% previously enjoyed by China.
In short, mining firms have noticed a clear and limited window to carve out a space in the market after the Chinese space rolled up entirely, and they are taking advantage of it to the fullest.Even as potential future snags , such as difficulties in the supply chain affecting mining equipment, lurk over the horizon, the industry has shown a degree of flexibility that can direct vast amounts of capital efficiently.The frenetic energy of bitcoin’s daily price circulations have ultimately redounded toward one clear outcome: it’s a lucrative time to be a miner.
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