Bitcoin Miners’ Revenue Surpass Jan. 2018 Level to Hit $1.12 Billion

Bitcoin miners generated an estimated $1.12 billion in revenue in January.

With this jump of about 62% from December, the miners recorded more revenue than what they generated in Jan. 2018 at $1.02 billion, but still lower than $1.25 billion in Dec. 2017.

This surge in miner fees resulted from the Bitcoin price jumping from $29,000 to an all-time high of $42,000 in the first week of January. The price of Bitcoin is currently around $36,000. BTC -2.40% Bitcoin / USD BTCUSD $ 31,409.19
-$753.82-2.40% Volume 45.69 b Change -$753.82 Open $31,409.19 Circulating 18.74 m Market Cap 588.62 b 21 h PBoC Talks Crypto 'Hype' with Banks and Institutions & Prohibits Use of Their Services 22 h No Major Inflows Yet But Outflows in Bitcoin Funds Stopped for Now, ETH Holdings 'Quite Stable' 22 h Bitcoin Network Can Start Recovering with Hash Rate Dumped 50%, Chinese Miners Already Migrated Overseas

In terms of per terahash per second, miner revenue jumped above $0.20 to as high as $0.27 per TH/s last month.

However, revenue generated from fees only accounts for about 10% (bringing in $116 million) of the total revenue. Back in Dec. 2017, the bull market peak was about 23.7%.

This is because average fees on the Bitcoin network are currently around $11 and only went as high as $17.5 during this bull market, unlike the last time when it surged past $60, as per Blockchair.

The increasing revenue from the Bitcoin subsidy suggests that miners were involved in selling their BTC. Just last week, there has been speculation that one of the biggest mining pools, F2pool, was involved in this selling but the co-founder of the pool clarified that their wallet is mixed up with many others like Mt. Gox “because we used to sweep UTXOs from public accessible brain wallets like `password` `cat,` he said.

According to Coin Metrics, Bitcoin miners spending and accumulating is past their ATH levels in USD. Karim Helmy of CM noted that “mining pool spending is just generally very small.”

Source: CoinMetrics

Bitcoin miners also continue to buy more mining machines [Core Scientific, Blockstream, The9, and Hive Blockchain] and pre-orders from last year are in the process of deployments.

This has the hash rate of the largest network at 120.7 Th/s, near its ATH, and difficulty at its peak of 220.8 trillion.