Wait for October: New Bitcoin Miner Demand Is Again Outstripping Supply

Bitcoin's recent bull run has juiced demand for new mining equipment, putting pressure on manufacturers to produce enough machines to meet demand.

"The surge in bitcoin resulted in increased demand and supplies were already short," said Steven Mosher, head of global sales and marketing at Canaan Creative, maker of the Avalon miner.

The price increase over the past several months also led to a significant drop of the time it takes for new mining equipment to pay for itself, according to data provided by TokenInsight, a crypto startup that focuses on mining and trading research.

To capture the new opportunities, Canaan launched a new mining model last month, the AvalonMiner 1041, which it claims can compute as much as 37 tera hashes per second with electricity consumption at 2,361 watts per hour.

Crypto mining giant Bitmain rolled out for sale improved versions of its AntMiner S9 model, dubbed AntMiner S9 SE and S9k just last week.

The resurgence of mining interest is also reflected in the overall amount of computing power devoted to securing the bitcoin network, which recently hit an all-time high.

Based on data from mining pool BTC.com, the latest one day and seven-day average hash rates are at 65 million TH/s and 58 million TH/s, respectively.

This aggregated computing power has jumped by about 80 percent since late last year when the 14-day average bitcoin mining hash rate dropped to as low as 36 million TH/s amid bitcoin's price decline.

Assuming all such additional computing power has come from more widely used mining models like the AntMiner S9 or Avalon 851 with an average hashing power of about 14 TH/s, that would translate to roughly 2 million mining units having been switched on over the past few months.

As a result, BTC.com estimates that bitcoin mining difficulty - a measure of how hard it is to solve the math problems that earn new coins - will further increase by six percent at the beginning of the next adjustment cycle to an all-time-high level above 7.8 trillion.