Bitcoin miners close 2023 with the most rewarding month since the market’s peak in November 2021.
On-chain data shows that bitcoin’s mining rewards reached 36,657 BTC in December 2023 UTC, with 21.75% of that coming from transaction fees thanks to inscription activities.
Meanwhile, bitcoin’s average market price remained above $42,000 after rallying to as high as $44,000, pushing the total mining revenue in December to over $1.5 billion, which is the highest since November 2021’s $1.7 billion.
Notably, bitcoin’s average monthly hashrate crossed the 500 EH/s mark for the first time ever, closing at 507 EH/s in December, which is close to TheMinerMag’s estimation at the beginning of the month.
For context, it took bitcoin’s network nearly 14 years to reach a monthly hashrate of 250 EH/s in Q4 2022 while that got doubled again in just one year.
The growth of 250 EH/s in a year implies a $5 billion hardware investment that has been plugged into the network, assuming an average cost of $20/TH/s, as well as 5.5 gigawatts of new power capacities, assuming an average efficiency of 22 J/TH.
The highest mining revenue in two years also means public mining companies with increased capacities and high hashrate realization rates will report strong results for December in the coming days.
Data from bitcoin blockchain explorers shows that Marathon received 1,765 BTC from the 221 blocks mined by its MaraPool alone during December 2023 UTC, which already surpasses the previous monthly record high of 1,527 BTC held by Core Scientific in January 2022.