Miners Have Been Selling More Bitcoin Than They Generate, Recent Data Suggests

Last week, Bitcoin miners sold 11 per cent more coins than they generated over the same period, June 1 data from on-chain analysis portal ByteTree suggests.

According to the portal's metric that tracks Bitcoin wallet addresses associated with miners, around 5,800 BTC was generated over the past seven days, compared to over 6,500 'first spend' transactions.

"The miner wallet can be owned by an individual, a company or a mining pool. When the coins get generated by the miners and appear in the miner wallet, they are counted as 'generation'. Those coins can then sit in their respective miner wallets for days, months, years or forever. It is up to the controller of that miner wallet to decide when they want to move the coins. If these coins are generated by a mining pool, the coins will either be distributed to the pool subscribers or sent to an exchange at some point in order to cover the fiat costs of operation."

It might be premature to call 'capitulation' even among currently inefficient miners.

Crypto Twitter commentator Conner Brown has used this data to argue that inefficient miners are capitulating, but some experts warn that the term 'capitulation' might entail different meanings.

Thomas Heller, global business director at F2Pool, told Cointelegraph that even when it becomes unprofitable to mine with certain equipment due to the increased difficulty, the owners normally sell their machines to places where electricity is cheaper instead of quitting the game.

"So far in 2020, there have been very few cases of mining farms going out of business".

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, the Bitcoin halving has affected the network in numerous ways, as the hash rate, block time, fees, and miner revenue have changed considerably as a result of the event.

In order to mitigate the increased difficulty and provide pre-halving levels of mining efficiency, a new generation of mining hardware is being released by industry leaders like Bitmain and MicroBT. Earlier today, Bitmain unveiled its new Antminer T19 Bitcoin Mining ASIC, which will reportedly start getting shipped out in late June.