You have to admit, we all did have that thought creep into the back of our heads last week with the Runes fee pump: Is this it? Is this finally the new paradigm? The Bitcoin network experienced it’s first post-halving upward difficulty adjustment last week as fees soared from Runes Mania and the network saw the longest streak of fee-heavy blocks in it’s history. So even the most grizzled mining veteran (We see you, OGBTC) had to be asking if this was finally the fee-subsidy flippening.
The answer is a resounding “No!” Let’s do a post-mortem.
Overall, miners collected a bit over 1,200 BTC, or $80 million+ from the post-halving Runes Mania fees. In the ~320 blocks immediately following the halving, we saw mining profitability skyrocket upwards by 80% from $104/Ph/d to $182/Ph/d. (Hashprice is is a measure of miner profitability).
But what goes up must come down (and in crypto it goes down fast).
Within 50 hours of the halving, miners were already even with the month’s hashprice lows of $74/Ph/d, and within 96 hours (after a sucker’s hashprice rally) they plummeted to all time lows of $58/Ph/d and have since continued to decline unrelentingly.
Currently, the hashprice is sitting right at $50/Ph/day and teetering on the edge threatening to dip into the 40s 😱
At least there’s 1 good reason to keep those rigs online 🙂
