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To add further suffering to bitcoin enthusiasts, the act of finding or "digging" cryptocurrency has become unprofitable as the price continues to fall.
This raises further questions about the feasibility of the accounting system that supports cryptocurrency.
The volatile asset is recovering less than $ 3200, more than 84% of the highs seen during its "tulip mania" phase a year ago.
At that point, towards the end of 2017, an increasing number of people spent real money on computers and electricity to create (or discover "coins" using advanced algorithms.
While engaging in the lucrative bitcoin mining business, these entrepreneurs were conducting "blockchain" transactions that actually tell you how much is in your "portfolio" and allow trading to happen.
Without mining, this system, which does not have a Federal Reserve or other financial institutions that support it, would stop working.
Revenues from Bitcoin Miner reached $ 4.7 billion until the end of September, up $ 1.4 billion in the first three quarters of 2017, reports Diar, a cryptocurrency bulletin.
At the same time, miners have spent more and more money on sophisticated IT platforms and in the electricity they devour.
Beginning in January 2018, a month when bitcoin opened more than $ 13,000, miners who paid retail electric tariffs brought home a profit of 86% on just over $ 1 billion; by September, the currencies traded in the $ 6,000 neighborhood, mining revenues were halved, and profit margins became non-existent close to zero.
"The investment proposal for smaller miners has remained valid for most of this year, but has since become questionable on the basis of an increase in computing power in competition for the reward of the coin base" , says the Diar report.
Since then, the dangerous life of bitcoin has worsened, with a slight relief from the point of view of costs, even if the price has halved again in what some call spiral of death.
Even some of the big boys are coming out: on December 10th the Chinese giant of the encrypted mining Bitmain closed its development center in Israel, firing all 23 employees who worked in the company's Connect BTC mining pool.
"Mining is profitable only at this point in China and Iceland," says James Rickards, strategic director of Meraglim, a financial analysis firm. "Both have very low electricity rates, and Iceland has the additional advantage of lower temperatures to cool the computers".
"If you're a miner and you can not make money this could mean that nobody wants to validate" Bitcoin transactions, he says. "I think we are at that point and that's why this fall has been so precipitous."
Nick Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, offers a somewhat gloomy prognosis.
"I've had a lot more questions about Bitcoin over the last 30 days and I tell people that I do not think we're still at the bottom," he says. "We are in what I call a" technological winter. "It's like what happened in the Nasdaq bubble. It was a recovery but it took many years."
At the same time, Colas says he does not expect the blockchain system to go out soon. "A lot of miners are definitely losing money, but there are still miners who can make money," he says.
