Bitcoin Remains Bearish, While Hash Rate Hits a Record 52 quintillion

The cryptocurrency markets are seeing range bound movement at the time of writing this article, with the total market capitalization hovering at about above $250 Billion. However, the same description cannot be applied to Bitcoin (BTC), the uncrowned king of crypto markets.

The market dominance of Bitcoin has seen a decline to 47.4%, from 48.7% three days before. At the same time, Ethereum (ETH) market dominance has increased from 15.62% to 16.26%.

Furthermore, Bitcoin daily trading volume has declined to $4.60 billion, from $3.798 billion in the last three days. Ethereum was not an exception. The daily trading volume of Ethereum has fallen to $1.40 billion, from $1.88 billion in the same time frame.

Tether (USDT), which is preferred during times of high volatility or decline in the price of Bitcoin, has seen a consistent increase in trading volumes to $3 billion, from $1.50 billion a few days back. Notably, the volume reached a peak of $13.487 billion on July 28.

Notably, altcoins such as Aurora (AOA), Basic Attention Token (BAT), MOAC (MOAC) has seen gains of between 3% and 18%.

Ethereum Classic (ETC), which is going to be added to Coinbase platform, remains strong at about $18, with a gain of nearly 9%. Other prominent altcoins, which defy the overall bearish trend are Zcash (ZEC) and DigiByte (DGB).

Bitcoin dominance

Bitcoin’s price may be decreasing but not its hash rate, which continues to move upwards.

Statisticians may soon start searching for words to describe the hashes processed by the Bitcoin network per second. The graph presented below shows that Bitcoin’s hash rate has increased to over 52 quintillion hashes per second. It is the first time Bitcoin has reached such a high level in its history. The chart also reveals that hash rate has increased by about 60% in the past three months.

A trillion and quadrillion passed a long time back. It is now 52 quintillion (a million trillion). In figures, that would be 52,000,000,000,000,000,000. To understand how large it is, the number of grains of sand on this planet is approximately seven quintillion. Earth also contains nearly 326 quintillion gallons of water.

The last available Latin word which can be used to express a numeric figure is Centillion, which is the equivalent of 10 to the power of 303. While Bitcoin is struggling to go past $10,000, the hash rate seems to be on a never ending upward slope. There are claims that these calculations consume energy equivalent to that of what Belgium, or Austria consumes. Three years back it was only equivalent to the power consumed by Iceland.

However, hash rate secures the movement of ~$8 billion worth BTC transaction. Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, has suggested the volume of BTC that can move on the network depends on the amount required to execute a 51% attack. So, moving $2 billion worth BTC is risky, if it costs $1 billion to initiate a 51% attack. On the contrary, if it costs $20 billion to initiate an attack, then sending $2 billion would be extremely safe.

Russia Today host and crypto supporter Max Keiser had previously stated that Bitcoin’s price rise follows an increase in the hash rate. So, crypto community would be hoping for a fresh rally that takes the price above the $8,500 level hit last time.