Why Bitcoin miners are looking for a different modus operandi

In response to miners’ mode of operation, the Bitcoin hashrate reached a new All-Time High (ATH). Time to shift to something new?

• Miners have now considered rigs as a better alternative to hardware equipment.
• The difficulty ribbon suggests that BTC offered a buying opportunity.

Bitcoin [BTC] miners are shifting from their dependence on hardware to mining rigs, according to Ki Young Ju. This move marks a significant development in the crypto mining landscape as miners aim to optimize their operations and enhance profitability.

According to Young Ju, miners are currently investing heavily in the facilities irrespective of the market condition.

Finding the easier route

Although mining hardware equipment also helps with mining Bitcoin, there’s a major difference that puts rigs ahead of the curve. While hardware uses Central Processing Units (CPUs) CPUs, mining rigs employ the services of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs).

Moreover, GPUs are better at solving the cryptographic equations needed to verify transactions on a blockchain than CPUs.

In response to the mode of operation, the Bitcoin hashrate reached a new All-Time High (ATH). The hash rate reflects the computational power dedicated to securing the Bitcoin network. It is used to determine the health, security, and mining difficulty of a blockchain network.

So, the increase in hashrate implies that miners are continually dedicated to ensuring maximum security on the Bitcoin network. But how has this affected miners’ outlook on the BTC market?

Well, one metric that can do justice to this is the difficulty ribbon. The difficulty ribbon acts as a visual representation of the network mining difficulty relative to Bitcoin’s price. 

As new coins are mined into existence, miners sell some of their coins to pay for production costs. This produces bearish price pressure on the BTC value (difficulty ribbon expands). 

And when the weakest miners sell more of their coins to remain operational, they capitulate. Also, the hashing power and network difficulty reduce in this instance. This leaves only the strong, who sell less, leaving more room for more bullish price action (difficult ribbon compresses).

HODL on to BTC

At press time, Glassnode showed that the difficult ribbon had compressed. So, using the 14-day to 200-day Moving Average (MA), BTC presents a good buying opportunity at its press time price.

At the time of writing, BTC exchanged hands at $26,313, losing 7.57% of its value in the last 24 hours. Furthermore, Young Ju opined that the current price does not seem favorable for miners to sell.

To prove this point, the CryptoQuant CEO and co-founder used the Bitcoin hashrate to hardware efficiency ratio. The ratio represents the miner revenue on a per Terahash basis to the operational costs.

According to CryptoQuant data, the ratio has not impressively increased. Therefore, miners may continue to hold on to their current portfolio and depend on fees generated to fund daily costs.