This is the current state of the Bitcoin mining industry

The market is at a standstill: Bitcoin has barely moved in recent months, the price of hash keeps falling - and electricity costs remain high. Is a new crisis looming, or are the market and miners currently simply preparing for a breakout following Bitcoin's upcoming halving?

Mining profitability declines

If you look at the hash price a year ago, you will see that not much has changed. Therefore, the growth of the hash price, or expected return per (peta)hash output, is stagnant. At the time of writing, the hash price is $62 per petahash. By comparison, a year ago the hash price was $92 - a drop of about 30 percent. In other words, the profitability of mining has dropped significantly within a year.

Hashrate reaches new record

Reason for the drop: the recently dropped Bitcoin price. Because: the hash price correlates with price changes, but develops in the opposite direction to Bitcoin difficulty, which keeps getting higher. In just one year, the block finding difficulty on the network has nearly doubled. The hashrate also knows no bounds. At more than 400 exahashes per second (EH/s), the mining industry is catapulting computing power to ever higher levels.