比特币矿工Riot与Anthropic签91亿美元AI算力协议

It was last October that Bitcoin hit 126,000. Obviously, it's been cut in half, 64,000 at the moment. Uh, this has lasted kind of a long time.

If you hold crypto, things just got worse. Another Bitcoin miner pivots to AI after brutal quarter. Specifically, this is Riot Platforms, and they have just struck a deal for over $9.1 billion with Anthropic as they shift their entire focus from Bitcoin mining now to AI infrastructure. And Riot joins the list of many Bitcoin miners who have pivoted in the last several months. Iron, Terow, Wolf, Cipher, Hut 8, all part of a massive crypto to AI pivot we've seen this year, going from a Bitcoin miner to a data center operator.

As Riot platform stock is moving higher,

the Bitcoin hash rate is plummeting. Actually, more hash rate has come offline in the last 10 months than the total Bitcoin network saw in its first 13 years of existence. Watch today's whole video. I'll share with you some pretty big altcoin news so you understand everything. But this is a $9.1 billion signal to the market. And I loved this analysis by CNBC. Let's watch then react. So, this is a trend that we saw come uh sort of start to take shape in the last crypto bare market, so 2022.

And this was really like a like a survival option for these Bitcoin miners that you saw were underwater because the cost of mining a bitcoin. Um like it was just too much for them with the drop in the price of Bitcoin. So, um now today with the current AI boom, we're seeing this as a much bigger opportunity for Bitcoin miners and for investors of that cohort. Um, so it is a deal between Riot and Anthropic. It's about $9 billion over 20 years.

Um, and

and I love that Riot shares are up like like 1% on this, but they're up 54% year to date. And what are their other options? I mean, of course, they're going to have to get into this.

Well, and it's also interesting because Riot specifically is among three different miners that have two date or until this year because Riot did have a deal with AMD earlier this year. Um, but until this year, Riot was really one of three miners that we started to be calling the pure play miners, whereas all of these other miners in 2022 started to look at the AI opportunity and those became the hybrid miners. Um, and so it was in a lot of smaller names uh that would be underwater when we're in a prolonged Bitcoin price lump like we are today.

So, Riot was not a hybrid model. They were a pure play, pure Bitcoin, and now they're a pure pivot. The agreement is expected to generate $9.1 billion in revenue over its 20-year term. This is Riot essentially saying and all those other miners essentially saying is we're betting on the need for AI over the next decade, the next two decades. Bitcoin maybe, but just not as profitable. And the hash rate of Bitcoin over these last several months, actually since around the all-time high of last year, has plummeted, continues to plummet.

Is this an existential crisis for the network? Not because where we are today, right? Dips happen, but because if this trend continues because AI is only going to need more processing power over the next few years, AI infrastructure is only going to give miners more revenue, not less. So, there's potentially a bit of an existential problem here for Bitcoin. As explained on the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast,

at the moment, if you look at corporate results, around 30% of revenues, listed miners revenues come from AI. Uh, but by the end of

I'm assuming that's going to be like 80 or 90% in two years.

Yeah. Yeah. By the end of the year, it will be 70% 75% based on announcements that these different mining companies have made. So, there's like potentially a bit of an existential problem here for Bitcoin mining. we've seen the hash rate fall about 10% I think maybe from its peak um and so there is this worry

so hash rate of the network or the amount of miners switching on and mining the network is significant mining hash rate is a key security metric the more hashing computing power in the network the greater its security and overall resistance to attack so notice Bitcoin's strength the hash rate of the network It's only going up over time. And by the way, pro note. If you want to not look like a beginner, you want to look like an expert, switch your scale to log, not linear.

The price chart right now, price is in black, hash rate is in blue. Price is set like a pro. It's in log. If we were set price to linear, oh my god, it looks like somebody threw up on screen. It's hard to read that. You can't. It looks like extreme volatility, but it's much clearer to read in logarithmic. We should do the same thing uh for the hash rate. And we see it's not as big of a correction as the media would have you think.

In fact, we've seen much bigger corrections, bigger corrections in the past while understanding the overall trend is up and to the right thus far. Another thing to understand and a big reason I think this is a bottoming signal just like miners switching on. I'm mining Bitcoin. Big announcements. I'm switching to mining Bitcoin. Publicly traded company was around the top around the top signal. The net buyers are the net miners which help mark the top.

If they become forced sellers, which the miners, the big ones are, that's around where bottoms are formed. And we understand Bitcoin mining will be fine. the difficulty self adjusts. Meaning if let's just to just to be able to read this. If we switch hash rate back to linear, the lower this gets, the easier it becomes to mine the network. The higher the hash rate gets, the harder it becomes to mine the network. If it gets too high and the Bitcoin price doesn't keep up, it has to self adjust back down to keep the network at par.

Let me give you an example of exactly what this means. Let's say Bitcoin's really popping off, the price is going up, more miners join the network. If more people are mining, block creation rate increases. The more blocks, the more Bitcoin is mined into existence because they get those that those Bitcoin as rewards. Now, a block, a Bitcoin block is mined around every 10 minutes. Could be more, could be less, but it self adjusts to about every 10 minutes.

So, if more miners join in the network and block creation goes up, which means the average mining time decreases, the mining difficulty has to go higher, which means you'll get less rewards. You're less incentivized to mine. Mining difficulty goes up. That was what we saw in the bull market of last cycle. When it gets too high, miners have to leave the network. Something else has to be more profitable. Not every minor you you're only profitable if you have the cheapest electricity.

So as mining difficulty increases, block creation rate goes down. You don't get as many rewards. Miners hop off the network. And then when eventually the mining difficulty gets back maybe to 2024 levels, 2022 levels, I don't know. Wow. It's kind of easy to mine Bitcoin at its current price and be insanely profitable. more miners will join the network and it starts all over again. This is nothing new. We've seen this year after year after year.

Let's even zoom. Look at this. Look at this. Back in 20 I got into Bitcoin full-time. I got into Bitcoin in 2017 2018. The hash rate was peaking at all-time highs at the end of 2018. Then we had month upon month about month correction traded sideways for month and months and months. Grinded higher and pop off new bull market into 2021. China bans Bitcoin mining severe drop in hash rate. Is mining over? Is this an existential problem for the network processing power is going elsewhere?

No. Eventually it got too good to pass up. Mining Bitcoin was so cheap. Wow. It's it's a no-brainer. and then more people hopped onto the network. We see this over and over and over again. Hash rate will come back onto the network because of the genius of how this self adjusts. So either two options happen. Number one, miner