No one expected the Monero hashrate to grow!

Today, all miners of the digital currency Monero have witnessed an unusual phenomenon. As a result of the longest bear market in history, the previously profitable coin they mined has suffered. However, many people are concerned about another question: why is Monero’s hashrate growing with the fall in its profitability? The Monero project is extremely aggressive towards ASIC miners. As you know, last year alone, it twice fought against ASICs with the Cryptonight V8 algorithm. Such forks contributed to the creation of five different versions of Monero. Each of them was supposed to provide improved functionality, but the original version still won in the end. Currently, the cryptocurrency is hovering around $40, which is the biggest drop from its recorded high of $720. Mining this digital currency is not profitable today. For example, a mining rig with 8 AMD RX580s at six cents per kWh can bring a miner $2 daily. Even if you set up the low voltage correctly, the Monero coin can only produce losses of 50 cents per day. Therefore, the question arises: where does the cryptocurrency get its power from? We immediately exclude simple amateurs who are beginning to gradually recover their losses over the past year, as well as those experienced miners who have switched to Mimblewimble. Today, it is not profitable for anyone to mine Monero, and this fact adds even more mystery to the question of why the coin’s hashrate is rising so much. Who can these miners be?

1. Alternatively, some company may be raising the difficulty at great loss in order to remove small miners from the market. At the moment when they leave the network, such an organization will be able to gather significant power to carry out an attack. Such actions could be observed in the Ethereum Classic network until recently.
2. The company has created a productive Asic compatible with the Cryptonight V8 algorithm, which continues the endless struggle between Asic miners and their rivals. Such a company secretly engages in mining before releasing equipment to the modern market.

Large botnets have upgraded to Cryptonight V8 and are now spreading much faster than before. By the definition of a botnet, we mean a network consisting of a large number of computers that have been specifically infected by hackers. For the previous version of V7, this created great difficulties, as official sources say that about half a million servers were used to secretly mine the coin. After the switch to V8, each affected computer became completely useless for mining Monero. Since the computers use all the resources of the victims they find, the price of electricity is not important to professional hackers – they are only determined to infect as many PCs as possible.