Bitcoin Today: Miners are shutting down

Price
The fall continues, BTCUSD did not manage to hold on above the $4000 and the price broke the support during the weekend. Despite that the price showed a rebound from $3500 level, as long as we stay below $4000 the pattern is 100% bearish. On the way down we have support level $3500 and psychological level at $3000. Bearish Trend Line and $4000-$4500 zone needs to be crossed to consider any turnaround patterns.

Today forecast
Trading Bounds: $3000 – $4500. Breakthrough below 3500 will continue the falling, with the target at $3000.

Latest

• Bitcoin Miners are shutting down
  From mid-November, in the context of falling prices and declining hashrate, 600,000 to 800,000 Bitcoin miners have been disabled. Such figures were cited in an interview with CoinDesk by the founder of the F2pool mining pool, Mao Xixing.
  According to him, most of the miners who stopped work are likely to use outdated device models, such as Antminer T9 + from Bitmain or AvalonMiner 741 from Canaan Creative. The production capacity of these devices is about 10 TH/s, and according to F2pool calculations, in the current situation, their work is unprofitable.
  F2pool itself has lost more than 10% of the hashrate in recent weeks. Currently, F2pool accounts for less than 12% of the total bitcoin hash rate, Mao admitted.
  “It’s hard to calculate a precise number of miners connected to us that had unplugged. But we saw over tens of thousands of them in the past several days based on conversations we had with larger farms that we are in regular contact with… This is what’s happening among miners in China.”
  Last week the Mao published a video in which a huge number of mining devices are simply dumped onto each other near an unknown building. Also from his WeChat-account, he shared a photo of a person who allegedly sells or buys miners by weight.
  According to him, when he wrote that the devices sell in kilograms, he was, of course, half joking.
  “Those miners being sold by the kilos are even older and obsolete models that aren’t usable anymore. So people are selling to recycle like copper instead of for further mining purposes.”
  Speaking about the reasons forcing miners to disconnect devices, Mao calls the recent sharp drop in the market after hard fork of Bitcoin Cash on November 15, rising electricity prices in China, and the fact that Chinese asic manufacturers are in a tough competition, releasing new devices and making old models uncompetitive.
  As winter approaches, Chinese hydroelectric power plants suffer from water shortages, which leads to a twofold increase in electricity prices compared to summer. According to Mao, if in the summer prices in the mountainous southwestern region of the country, where there is a large number of farms, could fall to 0.2 yuan ($ 0.029) per 1 KW/h, now they are at around 0.3 yuan ($ 0.043).
  At the same time, fossil fuel power plants, such as in Xinjiang Province, can produce electricity at more stable prices. As a result, the average cost of 1KW/h in China is at least 0.28 yuan ($ 0.04). And as Mao says, at current prices for Bitcoin, devices made in 2016 or 2017, no longer bring profit.
  At the same time, he notes that turning off devices does not mean that they are out of the game forever.
  “The change of bitcoin’s mining difficulty normally has a lag of about 14 days . After this wave of shutdowns, those players who opted to stay in may have a better life.”
  The latest data shows that over the past few days, the complexity of mining has dropped by about 5%.
  
• Head of Genesis sees the bottom at $3000
  The head of Genesis Trading, Michael Moro, in a conversation with CNBC, expressed the opinion that the fall in the price of the first cryptocurrency would stop at around $ 3,000.
  "You really won't find until you kind of hit the 3K-flat level,"
  He argues his arguments that the price has already tested the $4000 mark almost unchecked several times in the last few days. According to him, there will be no serious obstacles and on the way to $3000.
  Also, the analyst advised being cautious to those who are going to increase their positions “on the bottoms”. At the same time, he is sure, long-term investors are set to hold their current positions and are counting on price recovery.
  "This is about the fifth or sixth 75 percent-plus drawdown that we've seen in the 10-year history of bitcoin," he said. "And so if you have that lens, I don't believe institutional investors really ultimately care where the price of bitcoin ends in 2018 simply because they're looking at things three to five years out."