• Canadian BTC miner Hive Blockchain earned $3.15 million, equivalent to 184 BTC in December 2022. 
• They mined 4,752 BTC in 2022, 18% more than in 2021. 
• Bitcoin mining profitability has dropped by 70%.  

Bitcoin miners worldwide are facing serious problems in 2022, many players are struggling to stay afloat, and some even filed for bankruptcy. But one Canadian BTC miner, Hive Blockchain (HIVE), earned $3.15 million, which is approximately 184 BTC. They achieved this profit by curtailing their power usage in December 2022 and mined 213.8 BTC that month. 

There have been continuous efforts by miners to cut short power usage at the time of higher demands or sell back to the grid, all to cope with the troubled market. 

Hive utilizes a mix of computers purpose-built for BTC mining, known as Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC), along with GPUs to mine other tokens; these minted alt-coins are then converted to Bitcoin. 

Hive’s production was down by approximately 20% or 50 BTC monthly. According to the December update released on Monday, this difference was more than made up by Hive’s grid balancing activities. Their stock was also up by 2.2% on pre-market trading. 

They had also deployed the machines they designed using Intel’s INTC Blocksale chips, called Buzzminers. They have installed 1,423; the 5,800 machines, averaging 620 PH/s of computing power, will be shipped by the end of January. 

Hive had mined 4,752 BTC in 2022, which is 18% up compared to 2021. 

Current BTC mining status

BTC mining profitability is down by 70%, while the price of mining machines dropped by 85%. At the same time, mining stocks are seeing a down of 80-98%, and to top it all, the average industrial electricity cost in the United States is up by 23%. All these figures are not encouraging at all. 

In 2022, the average hash price was around $128/PH/day. Considering the general industrial electricity rate of 9.34 cents/kWh, margins have shrunk to 48% after the FTX-saga hash price hit an all-time low of $55/Ph/day on November 22, 2022. 

Compute North, once the second largest BTC mining host in the US, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2022. They went on to auction their assets in a sale under section 363 of the US bankruptcy code to pay back nearly $146 million in debts. 

Core Scientific also filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2022. Agro blockchain has also hinted that they are running on fumes and near bankruptcy. 

Reason Behind

The crypto mining industry is dealing with a trifecta of problems, rising energy prices, increasing difficulty, and dropping BTC prices. Major mining companies took debts in 2021 when BTC touched its all-time high to fund their operations. But as the market went down, they were reluctant to sell the mined coin at a higher price and bear the losses at a currency price. 

The overall losses for public Bitcoin miners worldwide had been approximately $15 billion.

Ritika Sharma

With a background in journalism, Ritika Sharma has worked with many reputed media firms focusing on general news such as politics and crime. She joined The Coin Republic as a reporter for crypto, and found a great passion for cryptocurrency, Web3, NFTs and other digital assets. She spends a lot of time researching and delving deeper into these concepts around the clock, and is a strong advocate for women in STEM.