When analysing Bitcoin market price, the miners’ revenue and the mining difficulty, certain consistent patterns become quite evident. Miners revenue flow highly resembles the development of the market price, indicating that the market price significantly depends on the miners’ rewards. The higher the reward, the higher the price. For example, the peak of the BTC price in December 2013 corresponds with the elevation of the miner’s revenue within the same period. Although the miners revenue echoes with the overall features of the market price, the first one is much more volatile, whereas the market price shows more stability and does not demonstrate such drastic and frequent change.
Since January 2014, we observe gradual decline of BTC market price and the miners revenue. This tendency is mostly caused by the significant increase of the mining difficulty. Comparing to January 2014, current Bitcoin mining process requires much more computing power, which results in higher expenses, namely electricity costs. The current mining difficulty (October 1, 2014: 34,661,000,000) remarkably exceeds the mining difficulty of January 1, 2014 (1,180,900,000). The difficulty has increased by nearly 30 times (29,3513421966297 to be precise). Therefore, as the difficulty increases, the mining revenue drops simultaneously bringing down the market price. Bitcoin price, the mining difficulty and the miners revenue show true features of interdependence and require constant analysis and research.