Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty is likely to break its all-time high in less than a day, cutting into the already decreasing profit margins of BTC miners.
At 10:23 UTC, Bitcoin mining difficulty, or the measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, is expected to go up 9% in approximately fifteen hours, per BTC.com, a mining pool, data. This would bring it to 26.58 T – higher than its previous all-time high of 25.05 T set in mid-May 2021.
Following this high, the difficulty saw a series of significant drops, which had led it to as low as 13.67 T. It has been recovering since, hovering around 24 T since November, and it seems like it will finally break through the previously set ceiling.
Hashrate, or the computational power of the network, has been on the rise as well. Since the previous difficulty adjustment two weeks ago, the 7-day moving average hashrate is up by more than 10%, per BitInfoCharts.com data.
Bitcoin mining profitability, on the other hand, has been dropping as the price of BTC corrected lower.
The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is adjusted around every two weeks (or more precisely, every 2016 blocks) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. The 7-day moving average block time on January 19 was 8.84 minutes.
According to ByteTree data, in the past week, miners have spent more of their newly generated BTC, compared to what they’ve held.
At 10:23 UTC on Monday morning, BTC was trading at USD 42,152. It was up 1% in a day and down 4% in a week.
Source: Cryptonews
