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As per my understanding mining process in bitcoin is fully automated. A manual intervention is needed only when: (i) A hardware failure occurs (ii) You might want to cool down the hardware (iii) You completely shut it off (can be due to various reasons)

Are there any more reasons why a miner might switch off his/her system given that the complete process is automated?

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One of the most common reasons for which miners go offline is when their profitability drops below the cost of electricity - this could either be the result of the BTC price dropping, or their local operating costs (costs including air conditioning, power, networking, hardware depreciation, etc.) rising, or the total network hashrate rising faster than they are able to acquire a new set of machines to proportionally increase their hashrate.

Remember that most miners aren't usually operating a single machine - they usually operate a mining farm, where a single machine's hardware failure or thermal shut off won't actually take the miner's entire operation offline, just reduce their effective hashrate. For a noticeable removal of hashpower from the network, such as when an entire farm is shut off, the cause is usually economical.

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    There is one more factor affecting profitability: the relative portion of total hashpower controlled by the miner. If BTC price stays constant, electricity price stays constant, but the miner's share of total hashpower decreases, then so too will their profits (because they will receive a smaller portion of the total reward).
    – chytrik
    Jun 25, 2020 at 1:47
  • Good point, I'll edit that in
    – Raghav Sood
    Jun 25, 2020 at 2:05
  • It doesn't matter how fast they can buy new machines to increase their hashrate; either electricity costs are more than the mining rewards, or they are less - since (for an individual miner) both increase linearly with the number of machines.
    – user253751
    Jun 25, 2020 at 9:33
  • It does matter, if the network hashrate is going up significantly - at the same electricity cost and the same BTC price, an increase in network hashrate results in a decrease in your returns
    – Raghav Sood
    Jun 25, 2020 at 10:58
  • Just a bit out of context but is validating other people's solution also automated or does it need manual intervention?
    – shubham kumar
    Jun 26, 2020 at 5:15
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Are there any more reasons why a miner might switch off his/her system given that the complete process is automated?

I can think of a few more reasons a mining operation would be disrupted, they are perhaps more rare, but possible:

  • The miner loses access to the electricity needed to run the mining ASICs. For example, if a mining operation is capturing excess/waste energy from a hydroelectric dam or oil field, there will be times when there is no excess, and thus mining will be halted.
  • The miner experiences some sort of disaster (fire, flood, theft, earthquake, etc) that forces them to stop mining
  • The miner is forced to stop by some local regulatory or judicial body (ie, they are mining somewhere that they were not allowed to, and were caught)
  • Personal conviction: perhaps the miner just simply decides to invest their time and energy into a different project, and so they shut down their mining operation. This decision could be made for any reason, seemingly logical or not.
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