Major Chinese Crypto Miners Expect Influx of New Bitcoin Buyers

A majority of Chinese miners expect a huge influx of new Bitcoin (BTC) buyers within the next six months.

According to a poll by crypto services firm RockX on May 4, 57% of Chinese miners expect a large number of new Bitcoin buyers to join the market in the near future.

RockX claims to have polled 42 prominent Bitcoin miners and members of the Asian mining community. Respondents include F2Pool chief operating officer Yu Chao, TokenInsight partner Wayne Zhao, Pandaminer and OXBTC CEO Wilson Guo and Bitmain APAC head of sales Fan Xiaojun.

Over 71% of the respondents also believed that the market has regained its confidence in Bitcoin. Furthermore, 45% of respondents believe that in the next six months, Bitcoin’s price will be between $10,000 and $12,000, nearly 24% think it will stay around $10,000 with low volatility and over 14% believe BTC will be worth over $15,000.

Miners’ outlook on profitability is optimistic

Most (over 57%) of the respondents also believe that Bitcoin’s hashrate won’t change significantly after the halving, and expect it to be between 110 and 130 exahashes per day. According to Bitcoin network analytics website BitInfoCharts, as of today Bitcoin’s network currently has a hashrate of 127 exahashes per day.

This seems to fall in line with what many in the crypto community are thinking. As Cointelegraph recently reported 37% of the cryptocurrency community expects Bitcoin’s hashrate to be higher one month after the block reward halving than it currently is.

A majority of Chinese miners also expect Bitmain’s Antminer S9 to be still profitable after the halving. The Antminer is the first Bitcoin mining application-specific integrated circuit based on a 16-nanometer process chip, but is not the most efficient machine available.

RockX CEO Alex Lam — who has reportedly managed mining firms since 2013 — told Cointelegraph that because of the wet season in China, domestic mining farms could take advantage of cheap hydropower and continue operating with older and less efficient machines.

Still, Lam noted that mining farms based in the United States, Canada and Europe could phase out older machines after the halving, predicting that Bitcoin's hash rate will fall by about 30% a month after the event.

Respondents also expect the U.S. economy to influence Bitcoin in the future; 64% of them expect the quantitative easing measures undertaken by the federal reserve to have a “somewhat positive effect” on Bitcoin. Only 12% of the respondents believe the measures will have a very positive impact, while another 12% think it will have no impact.