Hashrate Index Roundup (February 12, 2024)

Happy Monday, y'all!

Bitcoin hit $50,000 today in a rally that has been a long time coming – more than two years coming, in fact, because the last time we saw bitcoin at $50,000 was December of 2021, when bitcoin was coming down from the all-time high set during the last bull run.

Hashprice is all the better from the bullish price action, surging just above $88/PH/day as a result.

Bitcoin's price is doing most of the heavy lifting here, but a transaction fee spike from inscriptions is giving hashprice a bit of a nudge, as well. This morning, transaction fees rose to as high as 36% of block rewards, and for most of the today, they have stayed above last week's average of 5.44%.

With hashprice ripping, we can expect hashrate to continue its own ripper and add to the already impressive growth we've seen in the New Year. Last week, Bitcoin's hashrate hit an all-time high of 609 EH/s for its 7-day average on Wednesday, and today, the 30-day average set an all-time high of 553 EH/s.

All of this hashrate growth is setting the network up for a back-breaking positive difficulty adjustment this week. The current difficulty epoch is 80% complete with an average block time of 9 minutes and 8 seconds, so we're currently forecasting a 9.5% increase to Bitcoin's mining difficulty, which would drop hashprice back below $80/PH/day even with bitcoin at its current price.

And to top it all off, we're two months and 9 days away from the Halving...tick tock, next block, y'all.

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Bitcoin Mining Market Update

This week's market update is a mix of green, red, and white. Transaction fees fell significantly and posted the lowest weekly average since October 2023. As a result, mining rewards were down in BTC terms, although they are up in USD terms thanks to bitcoin's price action.

Bitcoin Mining News

Here are last week's top headlines for Bitcoin mining news:

• US Abused Power in Bid to Get Crypto Energy Data, Groups Say
• In Ethiopia, Chinese Bitcoin Miners Find a Xanadu
• Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 CEO Exits
• CleanSpark jumps on plans to buy four bitcoin mining facilities ahead of the halving

Bitcoin Mining Stocks Update

Bitcoin mining stocks are flying high in response to bitcoin's impressive $50,000 rally. Every miner in our update is up bigly over the week, and our Crypto Mining Stock Index rose a tremendous 28%.

Weekly changes to Bitcoin mining stocks:

• RIOT: $15.92 (+52.78%)
• HUT: $9.06 (+34.60%)
• BITF: $3.07 (+44.13%)
• HIVE: $3.86 (+28.24%)
• MARA: $27.28 (+63.52%)
• CLSK: $16.00 (+105.98%)
• IREN: $6.93 (+89.34%)
• CORZ: $4.04 (+28.25%)
• WULF: $2.38 (+49.06%)
• CIFR: $3.90 (+61.16%)
• BTDR: $9.16 (+30.84%)
• SDIG: $5.89 (+34.47%)

New From Hashrate Index

Antminer S21 Review: Examining the S21's Performance and Design

Bitmain unveiled its newest miner, the Antminer S21, at the 2023 World Digital Mining Summit in Hong Kong. 

The much-anticipated S21 series features the most efficient and powerful Bitcoin mining ASICs to date. Bitmain released two versions of the S21 at launch: an air-cooled version and a hydro version. At 200 TH/s and 17.5 J/TH, the Antminer S21 is the most powerful and efficient air-cooled Bitcoin mining rig available on the market today, and the Antminer S21 hydro is one of the most powerful and efficient ASIC miners in the water-cooled class of mining rigs.

In our most recent report, we review the Antminer S21's hashrate and efficiency performance, as well as its interior and exterior design. You can download the report in the blog post linked above.

What is OP_CTV and BIP-119?

BIP-119, better known as OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY or CTV for short, is a proposed Bitcoin upgrade which would enable new spending conditions for UTXOs (unspent bitcoin). Specifically, CTV would allow Bitcoin users to specify exactly how much bitcoin can be spent in a transaction and exactly where that bitcoin is allowed to go. For example, say that you have a wallet with 1 BTC in it. With CTV, you could create specific spending conditions that allow an authorized transaction to only send 0.5 BTC to address ABCD, while another transaction can only spend the remaining 0.5 BTC to address EFGH. 

What is OP_CAT?

OP_CAT is a Bitcoin opcode that Satoshi included in the original Bitcoin stack but which they removed in 2010. In October 2023, a proposal surfaced to reintroduce OP_CAT as an opcode for tapscript (the scripting language used for Taproot-enabled transactions) by redefining the existing opcode OP_SUCCESS126. 

Happy Hashing, and have a great week!