The recent sharp drop in the price of bitcoin has forced miners to disconnect some of the equipment. That led to a 60% increase, in the time spent on average finding a new block. Such data were cited by Ankit Chiplunkar, a leading researcher at TokenAnalyst.
1/4) Bitcoin prices fell by 50% in the last 2 weeks, this is economically tough for miners.
— Ankit Chiplunkar (@ankitchiplunkar) March 20, 2020
To cope with reduced revenue, miners switch off equipment to reduce costs, resulting in increased block times.
The average daily block time has increased by 60%
data: @thetokenanalyst pic.twitter.com/0vjEXb1OZi
The hashrate of the leading cryptocurrency network on March 12, against the backdrop of a collapse in bitcoin quotes, fell to 97.9 EH/s, losing about 30%. By March 20, the indicator fell to 82.28 EH/s. The fall showed that miners turned off the equipment so as not to generate losses.
Chiplunkar noted that the profit of miners is pressured not only by the drop in bitcoin quotes in dollar terms but also by the increased block search time. That reduced their income in BTC.
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The network algorithm provides that, on average, a new block is added every 10 minutes. However, in early March, this figure was less than 9 minutes, but by the 18-19th day, it jumped to 12-14 minutes.
The researcher noted that slowing down the pace of block searches can move the timing of halving. At the same time, reducing the block reward from 12.5 BTC to 6.75 BTC will put additional pressure on mining profitability.
The recalculation of complexity, which will happen next week, can help return the block production speed to the planned one. According to CoinMetrics specialists, the indicator will fall by more than 13%.
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Bitcoin analyst under the nickname Ceteris Paribus confirmed the conclusions of TokenAnalyst and calculated that over the period from March 10 to 20 (11 days), the average block addition time was 11.9 minutes, instead of the estimated 10. These miners mined 16,650 BTC these days against the planned 19,800 BTC.
During the most recent 11 day period (March 10-20), 16,650 $BTC were mined vs. 19,800 predicted using 10 minute blocks. There were an average of 121 blocks/day (vs 144).
— Ceteris Paribus (@ceterispar1bus) March 21, 2020
Average block time has been 11.9 minutes.@thetokenanalyst