Between 600,000 and 800,000 bitcoin miners have shut down since mid-November amid declines in price and hashrate across the network, according to the third-largest mining pool.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Mao Shixing, founder of F2pool, said his firm's estimate takes into account the total network hashrate drop and the average hash power of older mining machines that are having a hard time generating profits.
According to data from blockchain.info, the bitcoin network’s entire hashrate, which captures the aggregated computing power on the world’s first blockchain, has dropped from around 47 million tera hashes per second (TH/s) on Nov. 10 to 41 million on Nov. 24 – an almost 13 percent decline.