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May 18, 2021
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Market Overview
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Price |
24H |
YTD |
| Bit Digital |
$10.13 |
2% |
-60% |
| Bitfarms |
$4.61 |
-6% |
106% |
| Canaan |
$9.71 |
0% |
39% |
| Ebang |
$2.92 |
-3% |
-62% |
| Hive |
$3.06 |
-2% |
12% |
| Hut 8 |
$4.95 |
-1% |
66% |
| Marathon |
$22.73 |
2% |
84% |
| Northern Data |
$82.30 |
-3% |
0% |
| Riot |
$25.14 |
3% |
34% |
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Data as of 12:00 UTC
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Welcome to the Compass Contest!
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We're giving away $1,000 of BTC on an OpenDime Wallet! See the announcement on our Twitter. For a chance to win, you just need to be subscribed to this newsletter! 👍
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Mining bitcoin with lasers? Meet Optical Proof-of-Work (oPoW).
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The newest trend in computing hardware design may save Bitcoin’s bacon, one group of developers claim.
A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP ) calling
for the implementation of Optical Proof-of-Work (oPoW) was sent on the Bitcoin developer mailing list Thursday specifying the use of silicon photonic chips over application specific integrated circuit (ASICs) for Bitcoin mining.
The proposal outlines how recent advances in the use of lightwaves in purpose built chips typically used for artificial intelligence (AI) or speech processing could not only make Bitcoin mining less energy intensive, but a more decentralized network.
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Photonic-based computations use laser light over defined pathways. It uses less energy than electronic circuitry (CPU, GPU, ASIC, etc) plus has no heat waste.
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Cheap computation would make operational expenditures (opex) low, but capital expenditures (capex) high – flipping the current market on its head.
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The proposal would require, at the very least, a soft fork of the Bitcoin network to incentivize miner migration to phonotonic chips.
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oPoW would maintain the same nominal cost associated with mining a bitcoin block. The associated cost would merely transfer into the initial capital needed to secure the photonic chip.
Click here to continue reading this section of Mining Memo.
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Bitcoin transfers from miners to exchanges continue dropping.
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Bitcoin’s price has dropped nearly 35% off its all-time high near $65,000 over the past month. Trending down with the price is the volume of bitcoins flowing from miner wallets to exchanges.
Concurrent with the decrease in transfers to exchanges, the balance of miner wallets is starting to rebound, according to data from Glassnode. After a sharp drop in December 2020 when bitcoin was trading around $25,000, the total supply of bitcoins held by miners is slowly increasing again, reviving a trend that started
in August 2019.
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Correlating bitcoin’s price and miner wallet flows offers another perspective into this often-misrepresented piece of the market.
Click here to continue reading this section of Mining Memo.
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Mining Newsfeed
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🧭 Taproot activation fails its second difficulty period.
Bitcoin’s proposed upgrade, Taproot, won’t be activated during this difficulty period. Over 10% of the set 2016 blocks didn’t signal support, putting the 90% support threshold out of reach. A larger share of blocks are signaling support compared to the prior period,
however, giving investors optimism that the upgrade will pass in an upcoming epoch. Miners have four more difficulty epochs to reach the 90% threshold.
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🧭 Renaissance Technologies bought a lot of mining stocks last quarter.
New filings from prominent quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies show it placed big bets on cryptocurrency mining companies in the first quarter of 2021, and it appears to have also closed out its previously held shares of MicroStrategy. In total, the fund built positions in Riot, Marathon, and Canaan worth $140 million last quarter.
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🧭 Ethermine now processes miner flows on Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain.
Ethermine, the second largest Ethereum block producer, is now shipping block rewards to subscribing miners via Polygon, a sidechain of sorts for Ethereum. The use of a secondary layer decreases the threshold for paying out rewards to miners in
what could be a sneak peak for other mining networks in the future.
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Proof of Work Overview
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| Bitcoin |
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7D |
YTD |
| Price |
$44,087 |
-20% |
52% |
| Difficulty |
25T |
22% |
35% |
| Revenue* |
$0.24 |
-34% |
13% |
| Hashrate |
164 EH/s |
-8% |
19% |
| Ethereum |
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7D |
YTD |
| Price |
$3,428 |
-13% |
369% |
| Difficulty |
7,854T |
3% |
111% |
| Hashrate |
607 TH/s |
2% |
107% |
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* measured by $/TH/s
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Quick Bits
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Galaxy’s mining arm expects to reach nearly 2,000 PH/s monthly by the end of 2022.
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Argo Blockchain bought two data centers in Quebec.
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Greenidge plans to offset its emissions from mining with carbon credit purchases.
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Ethereum mining revenue is currently dwarfing bitcoin daily revenue.
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Bitcoin’s next difficulty adjustment is predicted to be a 10% decrease following the latest upward adjustment of 21.5%.
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The Fundamentals of Bitcoin Mining Economics with Drew Armstrong and AJ Scalia of Galaxy Digital
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Bitcoin Brings a Market to Stranded Energy with Ben Gagnon of Bitfarms
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Compass is a modern media and Bitcoin mining company focused on driving the mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Our research analysts and content creators strive to provide actionable and engaging content on the most relevant industry topics.
For more information, to share content ideas, or to discuss mining news, email us at media@compassmining.io.
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