In its report, the analytical company Coin Metrics offers a new way to evaluate the assets held by bitcoin miners. Miners, although to a lesser extent, put pressure on the market, constantly acting on the side of sellers, as they receive new coins, and do not buy them.
Coin Metrics collected all addresses that received payments directly from mined blocks and marked them as "zero step". Subsequent recipients of bitcoins from these addresses were designated as the "first step". Peculiarities of functioning of mining-pools assume that for a null step will be made primarily addresses pools, and in the first step – addresses the individual miners. For this reason, estimation methodologies that take only the zero step into account do not reflect the whole picture. Analysts admit that their model may not be completely accurate, either.
"Of course, determining miners and pools based on the distance from a coinbase transaction is not an ideal approach. This is especially true for network analysis in the early stages, where there are mainly individual miners. Since the first mining pool Slush Pool began production only in December 2010, it is not necessary to focus on data before this period, " analysts say.
The number of coins at the zero and first step decreases over time. The trend was broken in the second half of 2019 and the first half of 2020 in the run-up to halving. It turned out that during this period, the assets of miners increased by 383,000 BTC, mainly due to addresses from the first step, while the values of addresses from the zero step remained relatively constant.
"The decline in miner assets is consistent with a broader trend in the spread of bitcoin supply. But even today, miners and pools control a significant share of the total bitcoin supply, " Coin Metrics concludes.