In a recent tweet, Casa CTO Jameson Lopp reported that the network hashrate for Bitcoin had increased by 162% over the course of 2019, from 38 to more than 100 exahashes per second. While price fluctuation can be seen as an indicator of investor sentiment, hashrate can be used to determine network adoption.
While miner capitulation had been a reasonable concern in light of the rising hashrate over the year, it does not seem to have had any considerable effect. More and more miners have joined the network towards the scheduled halving which is expected to happen sometime around mid-May. This could indicate that fees are high enough for miners to participate in the network.
Further, rising adoption rates are generally a bullish sign for assets like Bitcoin which derive their value through a logarithmic relation to adoption. Lopp also tweeted about changes to other Bitcoin metrics over the year, including how its thermodynamic security accelerated at an average rate of 2,051 GH/s^2 in 2019, a drastic rise compared to an average of 885 GH/s^2 acceleration in network security for 2018.
He also pointed out how Bitcoin‘s UTXO set rose from 49.6M to 64.5M, effectively adding a net new UTXO every 2 seconds.
Finally, the Casa CTO noted that the number of days it would take to rewrite the entire Bitcoin blockchain for an attacker possessing 100% of the network’s hashrate dropped by 100 days over the course of 2019, due to increasing hashrate. However, he also pointed out that Bitcoin had recovered half of the 100-day drop in recent times.
