According to The Block researchers, last year Ethereum miners mined $936 million worth of cryptocurrency. The decline compared to the previous period was about 75%.
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Largely due to the advent of ASIC devices, the air hash rate reached a historic maximum in August 2018 at around 292 TH/s. After that, the network capacity of the second cryptocurrency capitalization fell by 43% to 165 TH/s.
Miners' revenues in 2019 amounted to $935.7 million. Of these, $901.1 million was a reward for the mined block, $34.6 million was income from transaction commissions - their share in the revenue structure is just over 3%.
In 2018, the income of Ethereum miners reached $3.78 billion. Thus, by the end of 2019, the decrease was 75%.
The activity of miners reached their maximum profitability in January 2018 - then the price of Ethereum reached a historical maximum near the $1,400 mark.
Thus, it is obvious that in the short term, the profitability of mining directly depends on the market value of the cryptocurrency. In the longer term, more players are connecting to the network who want to “keep up with the departing train.” This inevitably increases the difficulty of mining coins and, accordingly, the profitability of miner operations decreases.
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Also, according to researchers, last year the income of bitcoin miners exceeded the income of Ethereum miners by more than 5 times: 2019, the first cryptocurrency miners received $5 billion in revenue, and a year-earlier - $5.25 billion. Thus, despite the rapidly growing complexity, revenue has decreased slightly. This is likely due to the proliferation of more productive mining devices and the restoration of the BTC price.
According to CoinPaprika, since the beginning of last year, BTC has grown significantly faster than ETH. Because of this, most likely, Ethereum has lost its former popularity among miners.