Miners Purchase New Equipment

Bitcoin mining is seeing a "very important strategic shift" from China to the Nordic countries as the northern region becomes a lucrative place for cryptocurrency mining due to very low electricity prices. Since a new high in the price of bitcoin was reached in middle of October, the hashrate of the largest network has held above 120 Th/s, except for a drop to less than 100 Th/s at the end of the same month.

Bitcoin security, competition among miners and the current price of Bitcoin are forcing mining operators to order and deploy more and more hardware to capture a larger part of the Bitcoin market. Riot Blockchain (RIOT) previously acquired 15,000 more ASIC machines from Bitmain, bringing the total number of machines ordered this year to over 31,000, which is expected to increase the hashrate by 65% ​​to 3.8 EH/S in 2021. Bitfarms has announced the rollout of 1,000 Whatsminer M31S mining machines along with an additional 3,000 to be deployed in the first quarter of 2021. This should raise the company's hashrate above 1.2 EH/S. Bitfarms has already purchased about 6,000 new machines this year.

Amid increased activity in the bitcoin market in general, Scandinavia has become a lucrative place for cryptocurrency mining, again thanks to the fall in electricity prices. Electricity prices in the Nordic countries are now close to zero. Norway accounted for 0.48% of the world's bitcoin hashrate in Q2 2020, while China accounts for 65% and 75.62% in Q3 2019, according to Cbeci.

Image: Habr