Tenth CryptoSuper500 Report

Miners Receive Boost from Price Ramp in 2023 and Higher Fees

This blog is a summary of a research report published on orionx.net/research, and freely downloadable. It is not, and must not be considered as, financial, investment, or legal advice. Disclosure: As of this date, the author has long positions in MicroStrategy, Argo Blockchain, Marathon, and ETF vehicles GBTC and BITO that hold Bitcoin and its futures contracts.

Bitcoin is the most powerful cyber network on the planet, a global supercomputer of several million special purpose ASIC nodes working in concert, although each pursuing their owners’ self interest, to enforce extremely high security. This is directed toward creating a decentralized triple entry ledger and solving the counterfeiting and double spending problems. Over 10 Gigawatts of electrical power, processed through 340 quintillion hashing calculations per second (340 Exahash/sec), are employed to commit transactions and associated records with exponentially hard security into a hash-linked chain of transaction blocks. This is implemented via a winner-take-all lottery, with the winning machine’s owner receiving a block reward that consists of a subsidy of newly minted coins plus user-paid transaction fees.

Bitcoin is absolutely scarce with a protocol-enforced limit of 21 million coins, of which 19.4 million have already been…