Bitcoin's hashprice has fallen to a new all-time low, dropping below $35 per petahash per second (PH/s).
This record low is attributed to:
- A significant drop in Bitcoin's price: BTC was trading near $83,000, down over 30% from its all-time high the previous month, which has pushed mining economics "deeper into the red."
- Persistently high network difficulty and record hashrate levels: This reduces the amount of Bitcoin miners can produce per unit of hashrate.
However, the article notes there are early signs that miners are beginning to scale back, with the seven-day moving hashrate average slightly slipping. This reduction in hashrate is setting the network up for a negative difficulty adjustment of roughly 2% in the coming days, which would offer some relief to miners.
This is due to new tax bill. You get 100% bonus depreciation for buying a miner. So if you buy $100K of miners, you get $100K deduction in year 1.
So for anyone with high income or other gains to offset, buying a miner is an attractive solution.
It doesn't matter if you don't return your $100K investment, because the benchmark is your tax bill. So you spend $100K and only make back $80K in 3 years...but you offset a $70K tax bill....plus your earnings are in BTC, so if it zooms you may make money anyway on the deal.
That's not how deductions work, Corp tax rate is 21% funnily enough, so $100k capex nets only 21k in tax relief. You don't just spend money like the government is going to match it.
It's simple as there's always more chips coming on to the market, and otherwise idle chips are just depreciating. Chips that get decomm'd are the least productive.
It depends.
C Corp tax rate is 21% - but LLC's are pass-thru entities, which are taxed at your personal tax rate.
So say you sell $200K in long-term capital gains (ie. you sell bitcoin held for 1+ years) which may be taxed at an effective 5% tax rate (0% for the first $97K married-filing-jointly, and at 10% for the next 150K), then having a $100K deduction will give you big benefits.
The "bonus depreciation" loss does not directly offset capital gains on a dollar-for-dollar basis, but it reduces your overall taxable income, so in this contrived example you would adjust down your AGI from $200K to $100K which would result in a nearly 0% tax bill....
cap gains is 15%
So if you spent 200k thats a 103k deduction beyond standard, which at 15% is just ~15k in tax savings (0% over all but still only 15k savings)
You don't get taxed at the top rate from the bottom of the income when rates are graduated
If you reduce your AGI by $100K then your new taxable income is $100K
Further points:
As I said, the hurdle rate is your tax bill. You can take a $15,000 tax bill (in the case of $200K of long term capital gains) and produce some number greater than $15,000 by playing the "bonus depreciation" game....this is why real-estate itself is such a popular investment for the rich. The deductions transfer the immediate tax burden into a potential longer term gain by spending the money
You'd otherwise be able to depreciate the miners over the 3 years anyway, so it still comes down to whether or not the miners themselves are economical. You're not going to sink 200k into miners just to pull forward 2 years of depreciation, which would be only 10k savings in this current year.
The pull forward I think is more about keeping executives in stocks this year knowing things would get tight, and a massive earnings pump going into mid-terms next year (since all depreciation will hit earnings this year instead of next)
... now you've got me talking myself into at least looking at mining stocks fml
Wulf, Iren, CIFR
plus clean spark, riot, mara, hut
happen to know if any of those turds exclusively mines Bitcoin? or would I have to consider extra losses from shitcoinery and inference compute?
True, but depending on your specific tax situation, being able to claim 100% right now in year 1 may reap benefits that wouldn't serve you if you had to depreciate over a longer term....Being able to reduce your AGI today from $200K -> $100K (in the case of long-term cap gains + a $100K miner purchase) may be a much bigger benefit than reducing by $33k per year in the same scenario.
I think AI purchases also qualify....now you know why Nvidia is booming too...
There's may be a relation there with the AI chips and ASIC chips, hoarding, given the chatter from IC about a blockade of Taiwan... ASICS also get new datacenters cash flowing while AI chips are backordered
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Yes please!!
This is a good correction I think and should decentralize mining a bit, and neutral to positive for spot price. Hash rate falls from marginal miners, who are otherwise forced sellers of coins they mine, leaving block rewards to other miners who are not forced sellers.
I think it's a re-decentralization of mining a bit, as the number provenance coins decreases every block. Institutional accumulators pay a premium for uncirculated coins (subsidy) that can't come back as having "illicit" taint.
The arb on "stranded" energy has also largely been milked dry with AI datacenters hoovering up generator production.