Data on Bitcoin Mining | Hash Rate, Mining by Pools and Country

The bitcoin mining process is a key element of the Bitcoin network. It is basically what makes the whole system tick. As most know, the miners are incentivized to keep running the code and processing blocks and transactions with Bitcoin rewards at a rate of 3.125 BTC every ten minutes. These rewards keep cut in half every four years with the last halving recently in April 2024.

In 2023 and 2024 the hash rate kept growing, setting new heights month after month. This is the basic parameter that shows how secure the network is. There is some debate about this topic, since the equipment used to mine Bitcoin, the ASICs keep getting more efficient each year, meaning that for the same price of capital, one is getting more hash rate. Because of this some argue that the parameter that should be used as a security of the network is the cost of capital that is involved in the Bitcoin mining, but this is not as easy to calculate having in mind all the different type of equipment, the different producers, deals made etc. Although one can get the latest prices and make some theoretical calculations.

As already mentioned, the Bitcoin hash rate has increased in the last two years, especially in 2023, while in 2024 we have seen some oscillation around the halving. Usually after the halving the hash rate drops as some miners turn off machines because they can compete with the rewards cut in half.

We will be looking at:

Hash Rate
Mining by Pools
Miners Revenue
Mining by Country
Current Countries Share
Hash VS Price

The data presented here is mostly gathered from the blockchains charts, and the Cambridge center for alternative finance.

Hash Rate

The ultimate Bitcoin value is network stability and security. The network security in a proof of work chains is measured in hash rate, or how difficult is to mine. The bigger the completion, the higher the hash rate.

Almost constantly going up with few dips here and there. The most significant dip happened in the summer of 2021 when China banned mining. We can see that in the last period there is some volatility in the hash rate because of the halving in 2024 and somewhat slowing down in the hash rare.

When we zoom in 2023 - 2024 we get this:

A steady growth through all of the year. 2023 started with 260 EXA hash and ended around 500 EXA hash, doubling in a year. In 2024 the growth continued and surpassed 600 EXA hash. We can see that after the halving there was an immediate drop in the hash, especially in July 2024 when the hash rate dropped bellow 600 EXA for a short period of time. It has bounced since and we are now again above 600 EXA.

Mining Pools

The way the Bitcoin mining works is usually with miners all over the world joining in mining pools and sharing the rewards. Here are the top mining pools and their evolution in the last year.

The US base Foundry and the Chines Ant Pool are dominant in the Bitcoin mining industry with more than 50% of the hash rate coming from these two pools. Ant Pool seems to have grown faster in the last year and has increased its share significantly. The other bigger pools are the F2Pool, the Binance pool etc.

Top Mining Pools Share

The current share of the top mining pools looks like this:

The Foundry is on the top with 33% share, the Ant Pool is in the close second with 28% share. Next are the ViaBTC pool and then F2Pool and the Binance pool.
Note that not while a lot of these pools are Chines or US based, it doesn’t mean that the physical location of the mining equipment is in that country, as they join the pools through the internet and can be located anywhere. We will take a look at the countries share below in the post.

Miners Revenue

What is the miner’s revenue over time. Here is the chart.

We can see that back in 2016 the daily miner’s revenue was under 1M USD. Then it started growing a lot in 2017 and reached more than 50M per day. After the bull run in 2017, the miner’s revenue dropped to under 10M. It went sideways for the next two years in 2018 and 2019, and then increased again at the end of 2020. In 2021 the miner’s revenue reached a new ATH with more than 70M USD revenue per day. A drop in 2022, and a growth again in 2023.
As the price of BTC increased in 2024 the miners revenue reached a new ATH with 80M USD per day prior to the halving in April 2024.

On a yearly basis 2023 is the record year for the miner’s revenue and 2024 will probably set a new record. In 2023 we had 10B in miners’ revenue and 2024 will most likely end towards 15B. It’s because of the constantly elevated BTC price when compared to previous years, but also some new use cases that generate revenue from fees.
It is also worth noting that in 2023 we have some new use cases on the Bitcoin network like the ordinals protocol that allows for NFTs on Bitcoin and even tokens. These use cases have driven additional revenue to miners in the form of fees.

Top Countries Mining Bitcoin

When we rank the countries as the latest data available in 2024 we get this.

The US is on the top, followed by China and Kazakhstan. Canada and Russia are also in the top countries mining Bitcoin.

Hash Rate VS Price

When we plot these two together, we get this.

At first glance these two don’t seem corelated. There seems to be small periods when there is some correlation.
First at the end of 2018, there is a dip in the hash rate and in the price as well. Then again, a small dip in March 2020, and the most obvious in the summer of 2021 when both the price and the hash rate dipped hard due to the China ban. Since then, the hash rate has kept growing aggressively, while the price increased more aggressively in the last year and sort of catches up with the hash.

At the end the chart for the Bitcoin yearly candles on logarithmic scale: