After a disappointing 2020 in terms of earnings for Bitcoin miners, 2021 looks to be one of the most profitable years yet.
Records for the earnings of bitcoin miners
In March, in fact, there was an all-time record for earnings for this business with over $1.75 billion in gains, while in April, the second most profitable month since September with $1.7 billion, there was a daily peak on the 15th at $80.1 million.
Even August was very satisfying for crypto miners, with earnings totalling $1.41 billion, up 45% from July’s $971 million and slightly down from June.
This was despite the slight drop in the price of Bitcoin and the halving of mining fees in May 2020, as happens every four years. From the 50 bitcoin that were received as a reward in 2012 we have gone to 6.25 now.
China has declared war on bitcoin miners
There are many doubts about the profitability of mining, considering the enormous consumption of electricity that this activity entails (according to the British newspaper The Guardian, consumption is equivalent to that of a country like Argentina).
This is why recently China, the country with the highest number of miners, decided to impose a clampdown on all activities related to cryptocurrency mining.
According to Rystad Energy, China mined about two-thirds of the world’s bitcoin in 2020, using about 86 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity, 63% of which came from coal-fired power plants. But Chinese miners don’t seem to be too bothered by this fact and many of their operations have already moved to other neighbouring countries, such as Kazakhstan but also Canada and Texas, where electricity is still cheap.
In August, a 2 gigabyte block was mined, the largest ever
But all this does not seem to have diminished interest in an activity that is still considered very profitable. Suffice it to say that an average of 144 blocks, containing about 6.25 bitcoin each, are mined every day, which means that about 900 BTC are mined every day.
Currently, 18.8 million bitcoin have already been mined worldwide out of the 21 million that will be mined in total (the last one is expected to be mined in 2140).
Last week, a 2 gigabyte block was reportedly mined in Switzerland, the largest block ever mined on a public blockchain, but this time we are talking about Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, a fork of BCH.
This block containing around 5800 transactions reportedly earned the lucky miner a higher than normal amount of money.
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