The Bitcoin mining difficulty has registered another positive adjustment today, which has led to the metric setting a new all-time high (ATH).
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Has Seen Four Consecutive Positive Changes Now
The “mining difficulty” is a feature on the Bitcoin blockchain that controls how hard the miners would find it to hash blocks on the network right now. The metric is measured in terms of how many hashes the miners would need to generate before they can solve the block.
The reason this feature exists at all is that the network intends to keep its block production rate (that is, the rate at which miners go through new blocks) at a constant value.
When the miners increase their computing power (what’s called the “hashrate“), they become faster at solving blocks. To slow them back down to the standard rate, the blockchain simply increases its difficulty in the next scheduled adjustment.
The mining difficulty works in a completely automatic way, with the code that Satoshi wrote to guide the entire process. The feature serves as a measure for controlling the inflation of the cryptocurrency, as miners can’t just increase the hashrate to mint a higher number of tokens.
Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the Bitcoin mining difficulty over the last three months:
The value of the metric seems to have been going up in recent days | Source: CoinWarz
As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin mining difficulty has observed some uplift in the network adjustment that happened during the last 24 hours. Following this surge of about 2%, the metric has hit a new ATH of 62.46 trillion.
Interestingly, this is the fourth straight positive difficulty adjustment that the blockchain has observed, which certainly isn’t something that happens all too often.
The reason that the difficulty has been setting one ATH after the other recently is naturally because of the fact that the Bitcoin mining hashrate has been seeing some significant growth.
The below chart shows the trend in the 7-day average BTC mining hashrate over the past year:
Looks like BTC has been rising during the last few weeks | Source: Blockchain.com
From the graph, it’s visible that the 7-day average Bitcoin mining hashrate has been climbing and setting ATHs of its own recently. The fact that the network has been forced to up the difficulty four times in a row now just showcases how relentless the miners have been at expanding their facilities.
The collective revenue of the miners mainly depends on the price of the asset, as the block rewards are given out at a near-constant rate as mentioned before. Curiously, despite this fact, a lot of the latest growth in the hashrate came while the price had been struggling.
Thus, it’s possible that the miner expansion would only ramp up from here since the cryptocurrency has now climbed to considerably higher levels with its latest rally, and with that, the miners should be enjoying much higher revenues.
BTC Price
Bitcoin hasn’t moved much since the sharp rally from a few days ago, as its price is still floating about the $34,600 level.
BTC has been moving sideways recently | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView