Key Takeaways
- Bitcoin miners earned $827.56 million in August, a 10.5% drop from July.
- Mining difficulty reached an all-time high of 89.47 trillion in August.
- Some miners are pivoting to AI to offset reduced Bitcoin mining profits.
Bitcoin miners experienced their worst revenue month in nearly a year this August, with earnings falling to $827.56 million.
This represents a 10.5% decrease from July’s $927.35 million and a significant 57% drop from March 2024, when revenues peaked at just under $1.93 billion.
The decline in August comes despite a sharp increase in Bitcoin’s price, which more than doubled since September 2023, trading at $57,315 at the time of writing. The primary factors contributing to the revenue dip were a drop in the number of mined Bitcoins—from 14,725 BTC in July to 13,843 BTC in August—and a surge in mining difficulty, which reached an all-time high of 89.47 trillion.
This increased difficulty has squeezed miner profits, particularly after the April 2024 Bitcoin halving, which cut block rewards by 50% to 3.125 BTC. The median fees that contribute to block rewards also remained low, comprising just 2% of rewards in August.
Some miners, facing reduced profitability, have shifted their computational resources toward artificial intelligence, securing lucrative deals worth billions of dollars.
