Data shows the Bitcoin mining difficulty has set a new all-time high after observing a 13.5% jump during the latest adjustment.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Sees Highest Single Increase Since May 2021
According to data from BTC.com, the BTC mining difficulty now has a value of 35.61T after the adjustment today, marking a new ATH.
An indicator that’s relevant to the mining difficulty is the hashrate, which measures the total amount of computing power connected to the Bitcoin network.
Here is a chart that shows the trend in this metric over the past year:
Looks like the value of the metric has sharply surged up during recent days | Source: Blockchain.com
As you can see in the above graph, the Bitcoin mining hashrate spiked up and set a new all-time high just recently.
When the value of the hashrate goes up, it means miners are bringing more mining machines online on the blockchain.
There is something called the “block production rate” on the BTC chain, essentially how fast miners are handling new transactions per hour, and a feature of the network is that this rate stays near constant.
However, whenever the hashrate fluctuates, so does the block production rate. For example, the metric’s value going up means miners are now able to hash more blocks per hour thanks to the extra computing power, and hence the block production rate increases.
To solve this and bring the rate back to the network’s standard value, the chain increases its “mining difficulty.” The Bitcoin difficulty is a measure of the number of hashes that miners require in order to mine a block.
With it going up, miners’ pace is slowed down, and hence the block rate returns to be more in-line with the standard value. Similarly to this, the difficulty goes down in the opposite case.
The BTC network shifts its mining difficulty about every two weeks, and the latest adjustment happened to be today. Since the hashrate rapidly rose up recently, the difficulty has also naturally shot up.
The value of the metric has set a new ATH | Source: BTC.com
After the adjustment, it now takes miners 35.61 trillion hashes to mine a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain, the highest ever.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $19.2k, down 1% in the last week. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 10% in value.
The value of the coin seems to have stagnated during the last few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image from Dmitry Demidko on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Blockchain.com, BTC.com