A lower bitcoin price usually means slightly discounted prices on mining hardware for reasons explained in this article. With bitcoin still sitting nearly 40% off its latest all-time price high at the time of this writing, the prices for mining hardware have started to drop.

Hash rate generally follows or lags behind bitcoin’s price movements.

Price appreciation triggers higher demand for mining machines, which pushes hardware prices up, and eventually results in higher levels of network hash rate. When the bitcoin price starts going down, some miners become less profitable or altogether insolvent, which forces hardware liquidations, removes hash rate from the network and erodes some of the buyer demand for new machines that was present during the bullish period.

Year to date, bitcoin’s price has dropped roughly 14% at the time of writing, according to data from Coin Metrics. Over the same period, mining machines have similarly dropped by 12% to -23% depending on what level of machine efficiency is accounted for,

Bullish market conditions are always kind to paper gains on machine values for miners. And by the same principle, bearish conditions offer nice gifts in the form of discounted machines for miners looking to add more hash rate.