Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, January 30th, and today we are doing a Bitcoin mining update and more.

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Hello, friends. Today we are doing some mining updates along with a quick update on the China

story that we've been following. And let me give you a sneak peek of the relevance of this, I think.

It's pretty clear that post-E-TF, we are casting around looking for another narrative,

but the obvious one is sitting right there and staring us in the face, which is, of course, the upcoming halving. Now, at some point, I will do a whole show about having dynamics and how it

does and doesn't work, and when you can and can't expect, price changes because of it and all

that sort of stuff. But I have no doubt that a big part of the next narrative will be the halving's

reduction in the output of new Bitcoin, and what it means for the overall

supply dynamics. But let's get into today's story, starting with Compass Mining. They have published

their annual review of the Bitcoin mining industry, highlighting the rapid expansion of hashing

power over the past year. The network's hash rate began 2023 at 266 X a hashes per second,

and hash rate more than doubled to 542 X-a-hashes

per second over the course of last year, as new mining operations started up in existing

businesses frantically scaled. Mining difficulty scaled alongside hash rate to ensure that blocks

are added to the blockchain roughly every 10 minutes. Given that, average difficulty also

doubled over 2023, ending the year at new all-time highs.

Mining difficulty is now at almost three times the level it was in May 2021, when China

...