It just became a whole lot easier and much more profitable to mine for bitcoin. The world has known for months that more than half the world’s bitcoin miners would be going dark as China cracked down on mining. Now that it’s happened, the bitcoin algorithm has adjusted accordingly to make sure miner productivity doesn’t continue to fall off a cliff.
That adjustment – which took effect early Saturday morning – also means that way more cash is going to the bitcoin miners who remain online.
“This will be a revenue party for miners,” said bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi.
“They suddenly own a meaningfully larger piece of the pie, meaning they earn more bitcoin every day.”
Mining has become easier.
Bitcoin miners, run programs on your computer to solve puzzles before others. The solution to this puzzle is to complete the block. The process of generating new Bitcoins and updating the Digital Director to track all Bitcoin transactions.
China has long been the epicenter of Bitcoin miners, and historical estimates indicate that 65-75% of the world’s Bitcoin mining originated from it, but government crackdowns have led to national encryption. The miner has been virtually expelled.
“For the first time in Bitcoin network history, we have completely suspended mining in areas affecting more than 50% of the network,” said Darin Feinstein, founder of Blackcap and Core Scientific.
Over 50% of the hash rate (computing power of a global group of miners) has fallen on the network since the peak of the market in May.
