The Bitcoin hashrate broke its record on Monday, May 02. How to explain such a sudden increase in hashrate?
Bitcoin rush or fluke?
The hashrate soared to 491.15 exahash per second (EH/s), from 380 EH/s two days earlier.
This abrupt movement cannot be linked to the simultaneous branching of gigantic fleets of miners. It takes well over 48 hours to connect Antminers representing more than 30% of the hashrate.
Some argue that miners may have temporarily changed the hash frequency of their ASICs. We talk about overclocking and underclocking.
Overclocking an Antminer means making it hash faster than factory settings, and vice versa. This is possible thanks to programs like Braiins OS.
Miners tend to reduce the rate of their Antminers when the cows are lean (low BTC price). Slowing down the hashing frequency makes it possible to increase the efficiency of Antminers.
Clearly, miners generate less hash, but these hashes cost less in electricity. This improves the margins which are being cut by the fall in bitcoin and/or the rise in the cost of electricity.
Here are two articles with more details on over/underclocking:
–How to unlock your Antminer?
–Extend the life of his Antminer
We know that some miners have recently stopped underclocking. Bitfarm recently announced this in a communicated :
“2,100 new miners have been powered up in Argentina. Additionally, we discontinued the underclocking of our already-powered Antminers, contributing directly to an additional 0.25 EH/s. »
But we are talking about a jump from 380 EH/s to 490 EH/s! That’s an increase of about 30% in just two days. This would have required 100% of miners to increase the frequency of their ASICs by 30%. Or that 50% of them increase it by 60%
All of this is very unlikely. And then, it would be seen at the level of the hashrate of the big ones mining pools.
As of this writing, Foundry USA is showing 110 EH/s, or 30% of the hashrate. Next come Antpool with (23%), F2pool (14%) and Binance Pool with (8%). However, none of them show a sudden increase in their hashrate.
Also, according to the site coinwarz, the next difficulty adjustment (this Thursday, May 04) should be lower. A first since January 03. Which means that over two weeks, the hashrate actually went down.
In other words, the recent rise in hashrate is linked to luck. Blocks were simply found faster than usual. It happens.
And the fact is that some sites calculate the hashrate from too small a series of blocks. This results in an overestimation of the hashrate.
Always observe the average over 1500 blocks, or even 5k blocks, to get an idea of the true hashrate.
Everything is based on block times. “Instant global hashrate” does not exist”
It is true that some miners like Russian Bitriver are aggressively rolling out new ASICs lately. But such a jump can only be linked to a statistical dispersion.
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