But regardless of price and other metrics, new blocks and their rewards keep coming at a pace of roughly 900 new bitcoin mined per day with the current 6.25 BTC subsidy per block.
The first group consists of addresses that have been directly sent the mining subsidy and transaction fees from a given block reward — these are the mining entities that receive the reward.
Differentiating this data is important because it clarifies how on-chain behavior appears versus what might be actually happening since both types of address owners do not share ultimate ownership over the same coins, nor do spends from their addresses reflect the same type of behavior.
But while these mining entities are slowly growing their holdings, one-hop addresses have been gradually shedding theirs.
In short, mining entities still hold massive amounts of bitcoin, and there is no large-scale selling going on, nor has there been for quite some time.
But as with all on-chain data analysis, connecting real-world entities to on-chain addresses is never done with absolute certainty.
Adding additional context to historical miner holdings data, the chart below visualizes the percentage changes in balances on zero-hop and one-hop addresses over the past 12 months.
Miners hold and sell off and on through every type of market all year long, but their collective effect on the price movement of bitcoin is negligible.
Given all of the infrastructure costs and operational expenses that miners incur, they are one of the most heavily-leveraged bullish entities in the entire Bitcoin industry.
Mining is the mechanism for introducing new supply to the Bitcoin market, and given the significant capital and operational expenses incurred by miners, frequently turning over their inventory is common.
After all, if miners weren’t bullish, it’d be hard for anyone else to be.