Most older mining rigs will struggle to break even after Bitcoin block rewards halve in April, prompting miners to take them offline, according to research from Galaxy Digital.
As much as 20% of Bitcoin’s current hash rate could go offline after the Bitcoin halving, which will see block rewards slashed in half and leave only the most efficient mining rigs standing.
At the end of 2023, over 70% of the Bitcoin hash rate was churned out by eight ASIC miner models, Galaxy’s mining analysts said in a Feb. 14 report citing Coin Metrics data.
“Given how sensitive the breakevens are for the various ASIC models to Bitcoin price and transaction fees as a percent of rewards, we estimate that between 15 – 20% of network hash rate coming from the ASIC models [...] could come offline,” the analysts wrote.
