Bitcoin Hash Rates Rising Even When Its Value Is Decreasing

By Kapil Gauhar

In spite of the early 2018 fall in the value of Bitcoin, the top cryptocurrency’s hash rate continues to grow at an exponential pace. The price of Bitcoin has gone down by 53% since 1st Jan, and yet the hash rate has increased 155% during the same span of time. This continued rise in the hash rates shows a strong and continued belief in Bitcoin by miners across the world and might be a precursor of a hidden bullish trend.

To put it into layman’s terms, mining is the procedure of running complex calculations to search for a certain number. In a bid to find the number first, specific modern mining hardware is used to compute as many calculations possible to obtain the final block reward, currently valued at 12.5 BTC per block. Each attempt to calculate and solve the computation is called a “hash”, and the clocked speed of said hashes, or the “hash rate”, is calculated in hashes per second (h/s).

ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) have now become the only mining hardware used to obtain Bitcoins. They have a high hash rate ability and even higher energy efficiency. Each ASIC has a mining capacity of approximately 12 tera-hashes per second. (12,000,000,000,000 h/s). For a comparison, the total hash rate of the Bitcoin network on April 29, 2013, was about 79.02 Th/s. However, the hash rates of Bitcoin has continued to grow at a spectacular rate, suggesting a growth in the number of miners. So far in 2018, the rate has risen by 155%, from 15.04 Eh/s to over 38 Eh/s (38,000,000,000,000,000,000 h/s or 38 billion trillion hashes per second).

One possible reason explaining the increase in hash rate is the price of Bitcoin. The value of Bitcoin has fallen a lot in 2018, but the block reward of 12.5 BTC still stands at a worth of over $78,000. At its peak, a single block of Bitcoin was worth almost a quarter million dollars and it is speculated that miners may be seeing the current market as an opportunity to accumulate more Bitcoin at lower prices.

Overall, it is definitely a positive sign that Bitcoin miners continue to show their support for the cryptocurrency through the increased hash rates. They continue to strengthen the Bitcoin network instead of jumping ships to mine other cryptocurrencies. It will certainly be interesting to see if their convictions towards the network finally hold.