Often considered the king of the crypto market, Bitcoin is trading at $ 48,611 at press time. With that, BTC has dropped almost 1% on the last day and has fallen 3.7% on CoinGecko in the past two weeks.
Before 2022
That being said, Argo CEO Peter Wall recently told CNBC that what drove Bitcoin price in 2021 will also be in 2022. From a mining perspective, he said:
“We’ve seen the industry go from basically a teenager at the beginning of the year – the kind of insecurity about yourself – to a very confident young professional in their twenties this year.”
In the age analogy, he further explains that the mining ecosystem was even more mature in the 30s.
“… The regulators are now taking the space more seriously.”
With that in mind, Wall predicts that more hashrates will go online by 2022 as more miners are added to the system. This is when miners are “incredibly profitable when things are very profitable right now”. He also stated
“The margins are still very, very strong … but maybe the margins in 2022 will be a little worse than in 2021.”
In the meantime, it’s worth noting that the hashrate of the Bitcoin network is 178.01 million at the time of writing. A significant increase compared to October.
Source: yCharts
Profit utilization
Also consider an analysis by Arcane Research on BTC mining and mining stocks according to the latest monthly report. By November, the report indicated growth in mining profitability. However, since then profits have declined.
Not to mention the relative level of BTC difficulty has risen to a value of 24.20T at press time in the past 3 months.
Source: yCharts
Despite the decline, the report describes the mining operation as highly profitable and states
“Even though cash flow has decreased, mining is still highly profitable … Even after the recent decline, cash flow margins improved in 2021 as Bitcoin price rises faster than hashrate.”
If we look at the last year, another research report found that bitcoin miners had sales of more than $ 15.3 billion, a 206% increase over the same period last year, a record year.