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With the halving at just under four hours away, unprofitable miners already have begun to shut down their equipment, said the vice president of the major mining group Poolin, Alejandro De La Torre, in a May 11 interview with Cointelegraph. According to his estimates, these miners account for „15-30%“ of Bitcoin’s (BTC) entire hash rate.

„The personnel of the mining farms are shutting down as we speak, because they won’t want to do it after the halving, because then they would be losing money,“ De La Torre told Cointelegraph.

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The miners who are now on the run will probably never get back online if they do not upgrade their equipment or find extremely cheap sources of electricity, because the mining reward will be halved once the event occurs:

„All older machines will no longer be profitable unless they mine with almost free electricity or if the price shoots up twice or more.“

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According to De La Torre, unprofitable mining operations based in China will be the first to go offline. Halving will take place at local time early in the morning, which is why Chinese operators are now shutting down nonprofit units before looking for other opportunities.

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This closing of operations will affect the total hash rate, De La Torre added, as unprofitable units will soon generate „around 15-30%“ of that number.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier, Bitcoin’s mining hash rate has been highly volatile before the halving, and is likely to decline soon after it takes place, but then could begin to recover as the new generation of mining machines are shipped.