According to a recent (May 2) report from Alejandro De La Torre, as many as 30% of miners on the Bitcoin network may be forced to retire following the now-completed third Bitcoin halving. Alejandro De La Torre is the VP of Poolin, one of the largest mining pools on the network.
De La Torre’s observation is that a significant proportion of the miners on Poolin are using hardware that was only just making the cut before. With half the reward given for mining a block versus a week ago, less efficient miners are naturally squeezed out of the ecosystem after every halving.
The report includes a breakdown of the lowest quartile of miners on the Poolin network. These include miners putting out between 0-25 terahash/second. A full 37% of miners in this quintile (or almost 10% overall) were using machines processing between 6 and 14 terahash/second.
To illustrate how outdated these are, the newest machines can put out 100 terahash/second. Projecting the characteristics of miners on the Poolin pool across an entire assumed Bitcoin network, De La Torre estimates that as much as 30% of the pre-halving Bitcoin network was running on sub-25 terahash/second machines, and that these are likely to be too inefficient to compete now.
According to data from BitInfoCharts, hashrate on the Bitcoin network was steadily rising since mid-March back toward its all-time-high of 123 equihash/second before the halving. There is no clear sign yet of a fall from this high post-halving.
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