The industry of bitcoin mining is much friendlier for the miners as China’s shutdown on the process took hold Saturday morning.
With such a cutback in the number of bitcoin miners, the revenue opportunity dramatically increased for those still working.
The bitcoin algorithm has adjusted, meaning far more cash is going to the bitcoin miners who remain online.
A quick primer, per CNBC, on the process:
“A bitcoin miner runs a program on a computer to try to solve a puzzle before anyone else does. Solving that puzzle is what completes a block, a process that both creates new bitcoin and updates the digital ledger keeping track of all bitcoin transactions.
“China had long been the epicenter of bitcoin miners, with past estimates indicating that 65% to 75% of the world’s bitcoin mining happened there, but a government-led crackdown has effectively banished the country’s crypto miners.”
The new world is being not only celebrated but embraced.
“This will be a revenue party for miners,” bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi said in a CNBC report.
“They suddenly own a meaningfully larger piece of the pie, meaning they earn more bitcoin every day.”
The scale of the Chinese blackout is unprecedented.
“For the first time in the bitcoin network’s history, we have a complete shutdown of mining in a targeted geographic region that affected more than 50 percent of the network,” Darin Feinstein, founder of Blockcap and Core Scientific, told CNBC.
Statistically, it had taken about 10 minutes to complete a block, but Feinstein told CNBC the the time slowed to 14- to 19-minute block times.
On Saturday, the bitcoin code automatically made it about 28 percent less difficult to mine – a record drop for the network in order to bring those block times back to the optimal 10-minute window.
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