Even though the first three months of 2018 were not positive for all cryptocurrencies, it seems some things will never change. Over the past few months, the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash hash rates have remained virtually unchanged. Although there have been some temporary dips, the overall uptrend is still firmly intact.
Bitcoin Hash rate Remains Unchanged
Anyone with a keen interest in cryptocurrency knows that Bitcoin miners need a certain value per BTC to break even, let alone make a profit. If this value drops below that threshold, mining the world’s leading cryptocurrency quickly becomes unprofitable for most smaller mining operations. The exact figure required to remain in the green heavily depends on whom you pose the question to these days.
With the Bitcoin price having gone through a very rough patch in Q1 of 2018, one would have expected the miners to be in somewhat of a pickle. That does not appear to be the case as of right now, considering that the overall network hash rate has not changed all that much. In fact, it has remained surprisingly stable, indicating that people simply kept mining BTC in the hopes of seeing the Bitcoin value go up in the near term.
In the past week, the Bitcoin hash rate has begun to grow again. That is not entirely surprising, considering that the value per BTC has been increasing. With Bitcoin becoming more valuable, it is only normal that a lot of people will show a renewed interest in mining the world’s leading cryptocurrency. Before this happened, the hash rate remained pretty stable above 24 exohash per second, indicating that no miners were turned off during the price dip.
A similar trend can be noted in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem. With its hash rate not having dropped by all that much either, things are looking rather promising. As of right now, the Bitcoin Cash hash rate is hovering just above 5 exohash per second, having risen to that level not long ago. This is partially thanks to the increasing BCH price attracting more miners. If both ecosystems continue to grow, things will undoubtedly turn out positive in the near future.
The correlation between the BTC and BCH hash rates has not changed all that much either. Bitcoin is clearly the superior cryptocurrency in this regard, as it has been ever since Bitcoin Cash was created. Even so, there seem to be slight swings in favor of BCH every now and then, depending on which coin is slightly more profitable to mine at that moment. Given that both currencies are rising in value right now, this battle will go on for quite some time.
All of this confirms that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is doing just fine. Although a lot of financial “experts” claimed the Bitcoin price decline was the beginning of the end, things have turned out just fine when keeping the bigger picture in mind. The big dip seems to be over for the time being, although volatility remains present. With miners still supporting both currencies, the coming months will be positive for investors.
