Top 10 Important Events in Bitcoin Miners’ Eye in 2020

China controls the supply for dominant cryptocurrencies through mining operations. At the end of the year, we’ve tried to round up some of the most important events that have had big impacts on bitcoin miners.

March 12’s bitcoin crash

On March 12, bitcoin suddenly plunged to below $4,000, knocking off half of its value over two days. The plunge in bitcoin price brought the cryptocurrency market down with more than $100 billion wiped off in just a few days.

For bitcoin miners, the crash not only led to the loss of their crypto assets, but also forced a large number of old mining machines such as the S9 models to shut down, which caused the bitcoin hashrate drop from 110E to a low of 85E. On March 26, the bitcoin network witnessed the mining difficulty suffer the second largest drop in history by a sharp 15.95 percent.

The biggest lesson of the March 12 crash for the miners is that they should be careful about using high leverage.

Antminer S19

The most notable bitcoin mining machine this year is Bitmain’s Antminer S19 series. With S19 Pro offering a maximum hash rate of 110 TH/s at a power efficiency of 29.5 J/TH, and S19 models delivering a hash rate of 90 TH/s and 34.5 J/TH energy efficiency ratio, the rollout of these 100T+ mining models are expected to bring miners more profits under a bearish market at that time.

Bitcoin halving

In May, BTC’s block rewards were slashed by 50% to just 6.25 BTC. When it comes to halving’s impact on miners, those who operate old mining models are the first to be affected. While the cheap hydropower during the rainy season in south China and the steady rise in bitcoin price after the halving have allowed a large number of old energy-guzzling miners to keep working.

Electricity from industrial park

A lineup of cities in southwest China with abundant hydroelectric energy have been encouraging bitcoin mining operations by setting up demonstration industrial park to help consume excessive hydropower this rainy season. The electricity offered by the industrial park promotes the standardization and transparency of mining activities, enabling miners to have access to more stable and compliant electricity at a relatively cheap price.

DeFi liquidity mining

In late May and early June, decentralized lending platform Compound took the first lead in DeFi liquidity mining, with its token COMP peaking at $372. The success of Compound has breathed new life into DeFi and led a growing number of projects offering similar incentives for liquidity mining.

Liquidity mining is the act of providing liquidity via cryptocurrencies to decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Since the primary goal of an exchange is to be liquid, DEXs seek to reward users willing to bring capital to their platform. As liquidity mining does not require the purchase of a mining machine, the selection of a mining farm, or the deployment of a pool, it is simple and easy to mine by depositing or lending designated token assets in a DeFi app. The annual rate on return can reach hundreds of percent at peak, while those who mine by using substantial machines are teased as “outdated classic miners”.

However, the bubble burst soon after a short period of frenzy, and many tokens’ prices went for pennies, even heading straight to zero. In the end, it turned out that those “classic miners” had the last laugh, as the explosion of DeFi caused Ethereum network congestion and Gas prices to soar, and some GPU miners’ revenues even tripled over that period

Filecoin mainnet launch

On October 16, Filecoin, a public storage project that had been delayed for more than two years, finally went online. On the eve of the launch day, miners complained that the official FIL pledge rules were too strict and the Filecoin team finally made a compromise after some argues.

BCH fork again

The Bitcoin Cash network, a result of a hard fork from Bitcoin, has split into two new blockchains, again on November 15.

At press time, the price of BCH is 310USDT, and the price of forked coin BCHA is 19.5USDT, less than one tenth of the former. For miners, it is nice to get a free BCHA after the fork.

Ethereum 2.0 and 4G GPU

Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain was launched on December 1. At the time of this writing, the accumulated number of ETH staked in Ethereum 2.0 contract is over 1.79 million and the current annual return rate on staking is around 11.5%.

For miners, the biggest impact of Ethereum 2.0 is its PoS consensus mechanism. Once the current Ethereum PoW chain is incorporated into PoS, the Ethereum miners can no longer mine ETH. For now, however, miners need not worry, as Ethereum could be mined for another year and a half to two years, according to industry veterans.

In addition to Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum miners are also eyeing on 4G GPUs. DAG files are expected to exceed 4G this Christmas, according to Data from Spark Pool. Currently, some 4G GPUs have completed the expansion or are being expanded to 6G/8G. How it will influence the hashrate of the Ethereum network, miners are keeping an eye on it.

Bitcoin price ATH

At the end of this crazy year, Bitcoin price hit an all-time high of more than $20,000 over the past few days. While the mining activities seem to be less affected by the volatile price swings these days. Will large numbers of mining machine flood in and the mining difficulty pose a great increase? It is worthy to be seen for miners.