Bitcoin ($BTC)
Last updated
Last updated
At current rate of new bitcoin creation, the most efficient bitcoin miners create new bitcoin at a rate of 900 per day. After sometime April 2024 that rate of new supply will be cut to 450 new bitcoins per day.
That means 328,500 new bitcoins are produced annually currently valued at $17 billion (current price is about $52,000).
One of the most efficient miners is a company called CleanSpark ($CLSK). The cost to mine bitcoin varies quite a lot but CleanSpark, which uses clean energy exclusively, is somewhere around $15,000 per coin, give or take $5,000.
At that price, all of the bitcoin mined in the world in the past twelve months cost $4.9275B to mine. The current value of new bitcoin is $17.082B.
Not all miners are as efficient as CleanSpark but the less efficient ones are put out of business by the ones that are more efficient. CleanSpark is wildly profitable at present.
Under the best of circumstances, about $12B of profit is available to bitcoin miners at present. (Side note, bitcoin miners actually make money based on transaction fees as well.)
Remember the total cost to mine bitcoin is a best case scenario of ~$5B at present.
In 2022, it cost on average $6.9B to mine gold. New gold production account for an ~2% increase in supply over all. At current prices, the gold mined in 2022 is worth ~$11B today.
Gold: $11B minus $6.9B equals $4.1B profit.
Bitcoin: $17B minus $5B equals $12B. Even with the cost of mining bitcoin were to double, mining bitcoin can currently be more profitable than mining gold.
Many people in finance consider bitcoin to be a durable store of value and a digital replacement for gold. The fact that it is purely digital makes it significantly easier to transport internationally, harder to censor, and more verifiable.