This week’s surge in the price of Bitcoin has seen a crop of new crypto-based millionaires emerge and most of them are early miners, data from on-chain market analytics firm, Glassnode, have shown.

Bitcoin hit a new record high above $23,000 on Thursday December 17 after soaring by 12% to $23,421, according to crypto market data provider Coin Metrics, taking its year-to-date gains to more than 200%.

Glassnode notes that there’s been a 150% rise in the number of Bitcoin wallet addresses holding at least US$1 million following the price surge – or 66540 addresses.

“$BTC crossing $20k has turned all early miner addresses (50 BTC block rewards, unspent or lost) into millionaire addresses,” it states in a tweet. There are suggestions that most of the miners who are now assumed to be millionaires supposedly mined a Bitcoin block between 2009 and 2012.

Earlier it had noted that the risen price brought the percentage of Bitcoin addresses in a state of profit to 100% – that is the percentage of unique addresses whose funds have an average buy price (the price at the time coins were transferred into an address) that is lower than the current price.

The good news of the price spike also saw liquidations of short positions across exchanges including on Binance where some traders’ $94,293,438 was reportedly liquidated in an hour.

All you had to do to be a millionaire today, is mine a *single* #Bitcoin block between 2009 and 2012.

You had 210,000 chances to do so. https://t.co/Z2i5fz574d

— Rafael Schultze-Kraft (@n3ocortex) December 17, 2020

Bitmain in highest US miner order
Bitcoin price surge comes as Bitmain, the world’s leading producer of cryptocurrency mining hardware, announced it has a new purchase deal with a top blockchain hosting provider in North America to supply them with more than 58,000 additional S19 Series Antminers.

Core Scientific will receive the shipment through September 2021 to make its total purchase of Bitmain’s S19 Series to 76,024 in the past 16 months for the value of over US$129 million. Its CEO, Kevin Turner, notes that they have seen a rise in demand from new and existing customers in addition to a significant uptick in institutional interest for digital asset mining in North America following their last purchase agreement with Bitmain in June.

The new deal is instrumental, Turner said, “as we compete for head-on for global hash rate and solidify our position as the largest hosting provider in North America.”

Interest in Bitcoin mining could rise?
China has always been known to be home to the largest number of Bitcoin miners but it is not clear if the majority of the early miners in question had been from there since the mining equipment cost, difficulty and interest were not as high as today.

With miners’ profit set to see further rise should projections for a higher Bitcoin price gets by, interest in the process of creating new Bitcoin through solving a computational puzzle – regardless of the increase in the cost of mining equipment – could be rekindled particularly as another halving is set for 2024.

Before the block reward halving in May, there were questions of whether the event which cuts into two the amount new mints could be the catalyst for the next Bitcoin bull run. TradeBlock had noted that it expects Bitcoin price to rise above estimated mining breakeven levels of around $7,300 post-halving if it follows similar patterns with the prior two halvings. It had added that anything different from that could see many marginal miners not make it after 2020’s halving unless Bitcoin exchange rate rises significantly.

A repeat of a similar pattern ahead of 2024 may encourage new miners.