On-chain data shows Bitcoin just got harder to mine as the network Difficulty has witnessed an increase during the latest adjustment.
Bitcoin Difficulty Has Just Set A New All-Time High
According to data from CoinWarz, the Bitcoin Difficulty has gone up in the most recent adjustment. The “Difficulty” here refers to a feature on the BTC blockchain that controls how hard the miners would find it to mine blocks on the network right now. It’s measured in units of ‘hashes.’
The metric’s value changes about every two weeks during what is known as a network ‘adjustment.’ Just like with the other aspects of the BTC blockchain, no human has any control over adjustments; the code written by Satoshi automatically conducts these events.
As for why the pseudonymous creator added this feature into the cryptocurrency, the reason is so that the block time on the chain remains consistent at around 10 mins per block.
If the block time exceeds 10 mins, it means the miners are performing their task slower than usual. To correct this, the network drops the Difficulty in the next adjustment. Similarly, it ups the metric if miners are churning out blocks at a rate faster than 10 minutes for each.
The latest Bitcoin adjustment occurred during this past weekend. Below is a chart that shows how the Difficulty changed in this event.
As is visible in the graph, the network has sharply risen its Difficulty during this adjustment. Prior to the event, the metric stood at 108.1 terahashes, but now it has jumped to 114.1 terahashes, a new all-time high (ATH).
This significant positive change of 5.6% means that the miners have been much faster during the last couple of weeks as compared to the two-week period before then.
The faster pace of the miners is a result of the aggressive expansion that they have recently participated in. Below is a chart from Blockchain.com for the Hashrate, that showcases this growth in mining farms.
The “Hashrate” here is an indicator that keeps track of the total amount of computing power that the miners have currently connected to the Bitcoin network. Its value is denoted in terms of ‘hashes per second.’
From the chart, it’s apparent that the Hashrate was stuck in consolidation during the second half of last month, but bullish momentum in the metric has reignited this month and in quite a spectacular fashion at that.
Following the relentless miner expansion, the indicator set a new ATH of around 845,200 terahashes per second this past Saturday. While miners have displayed enthusiasm recently, it’s possible that the Difficulty explosion would cause some of them to roll back in the coming days.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is floating around $98,200, up almost 4% in the last seven days.
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