August 2024 saw Bitcoin miners facing their lowest revenue levels in nearly a year, with a significant drop due to increased mining difficulty and reduced transaction volumes.
Bitcoin miners experienced their lowest revenue month in nearly a year this past August, marking the worst financial performance since September 2023. The total revenue generated by miners in August 2024 dropped to $827.56 million, reflecting a decline of over 10.5% compared to July’s $927.35 million. Despite this decrease, the August revenue still marked a 5% increase from the same period in 2023, according to data from Bitbo.
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This significant drop in revenue highlights a 57% decline from the March 2024 peak, where Bitcoin mining revenues reached nearly $1.93 billion. Notably, this March peak coincided with Bitcoin’s all-time high of over $73,500 on March 13, 2024.
The revenue dip in August 2024 is the lowest since September 2023, when miners earned $727.79 million with Bitcoin’s price hovering around $25,000. In contrast, Bitcoin’s price has more than doubled since then, trading at approximately $57,315 at the time of writing.
In addition to the revenue decline, the number of mined Bitcoins also saw a slight decrease, dropping from around 14,725 BTC in July to 13,843 BTC in August 2024. This reduction in revenue is attributed to a combination of falling transaction volumes and an increase in mining difficulty. The difficulty surge was exacerbated by the Bitcoin halving event in April, which slashed rewards by 50% to 3.125 BTC.
Median transaction fees, which constitute a portion of the block reward, averaged 2% throughout August. Meanwhile, the daily confirmed transaction 30-day average peaked on July 31 at nearly 631,648 before receding to 594,871 by the end of August, according to Bitbo and Blockchain.com data.
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Moreover, mining difficulty reached a new high in August, hitting 89.47 trillion, up from 86.87 trillion in July. The growing challenge and shrinking profitability of Bitcoin mining have driven some miners to allocate their computing resources to artificial intelligence projects, with some deals reportedly generating billions of dollars.
