A few months back I talked about those large players and how unsustainable their operations were, I know it did sound funny back when, because all members here combined don't have a fraction of the hashrate that a single large miner has, but the numbers were written on the wall, anyone could see them, you didn't need a crystal ball to figure that much out.
Now, luckily, it seems like that vision is coming true, Iris Energy which owns 5EH worth of hashrate had to turn off 3.6EH because gears failed to generate enough money for the loan, so that's 3.6EH out of the game probably for a very long time.
The second big player that is going to hit the wall soon is Core Scientific the largest bitcoin miner on planet earth with more than 30EH worth of hashrate, Core is running out of liquidity and they are looking for someone to give them some cash so they can maintain their operation at full speed.
It seems like FTX failure will be the "Straw that broke the camel's back" because FTX was going to bailout BlockFi (Core Scientific's lender) and now that isn't going to happen anymore, Core Scientific has a debt of nearly $1 billion, the large players combined have nearly 4$ billion in debt, a large amount of it being owed to lenders like Celsius's and BlockFi, those lenders took investors money, gave them to large gamblers that paid 15k for S19
, the miners now can't pay back, despite having a huge amount of value in hashrate, they can't keep up with the high-interest rate, so everyone is fudged.
It's really just a domino effect, people hype into crypto, they give their hard-earned money to lenders for a good return (which usually doesn't come), and the lenders give that money to greedy miners who think they can grow their hashrate to infinity, everyone in this equation thinks the bull market will go on for a lot longer, but then change of plans happens and the market collapse, everyone involved in this show gets burned.
So what is it going to be? Core said they will hardly have enough money to operate for the rest of the year, so what? unplug 30EH? start praying 20 times a day that
BTC goes to 50k before the year ends.? or someone will buy their debt and buy them more time. but who will?
Whoever is brave/crazy enough to put their money in this black whole has to believe that
BTC is going to start putting new ATH pretty soon, does anyone really think so? or maybe they will just be forced to default on loans, file bankruptcy and sell their gears, maybe sell half the gears to get enough cash to operate the rest? but then those gears will have to be sold at a huge discount, someone else with a better business model might buy them and brings the difficulty back up while
BTC price doesn't move any higher and the next thing you see is the bitcoin halving which will be the last episode of this shit show.
The next few months will be fun to watch, but regardless of what happens, as I said a few weeks ago, the current hashrate is extremely unlikely to be sustained at current prices, the only logical way for difficulty is down.
Sources for those interested in reading:
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/22/bitcoin-mining-giant-core-scientific-ended-october-with-32m-in-cash/https://cointelegraph.com/news/iris-energy-to-cut-mining-hardware-after-defaulting-on-108m-loan