Bitcoin Hash Rate Reaches All-Time Highs, Squeezing Miners’ Profit Margins

During a bear period for Bitcoin, the hash rate and difficulty of mining the new coin reached an all-time high, presenting interesting new challenges and opportunities to mining companies, pools, and individual miners as they look to the future.

New data from CoinMetrics shows a sudden spike in Bitcoin's hash rate, just one week after two months of substantial activity. This period included a trend of miners surrendering, as more independent and smaller firms began to take steps like selling all their mined coins for dollars, dipping into cold storage bitcoin reserves for cash, and shutting down operations altogether.