The difficulty of BTC mining has increased by 6% – it’s still 48% easier to find BTC blocks than 30 days ago
2 min readAs expected, the difficulty of BTC mining increased this week and jumped 6.03% higher. This happened after four downward declines in difficulty facilitated BTC mining by 54% than before mid-May.
The difficulty of BTC mining has increased and it is expected to increase further
At block height 693 504, the difficulty of the BTC blockchain itself adjusted depending on how much hashpower is devoted to the network. The more the hashrate is dedicated to the BTC string, the more the difficulty will increase every two weeks. On the other hand, if a large number of miners go offline and the hashrate decreases, the difficulty decreases, making it easier for mining participants to find BTC blocks.
The BTC system and its operation are mathematically predictable, which is a marked difference from the shadow financing system in which the US government and the Federal Reserve have been participating for decades. Because BTC is transparent, we know that every 2016 blocks, the difficulty changes so that the block generation time remains around 10 minutes.
On June 28, 2021, the BTC network hashrate dropped to 69 EH / s, but has increased by 59.42% since then.
While the last four difficulty changes made mining easier by 54% than before May 13, the difficulty increased by 6% for the first time in eight weeks. The reason is that the miners who went offline during the intervention in China returned to some extent.
At the time of writing, the hashrate is over 107 exahashes per second (EH / s) around 114 EH / s on Sunday. This is much better than 33 days ago, when 90-day recorded statistics showed that the hashrate dropped to 69 EH / s on June 28. This decrease in hashrat led to a massive 27.94% decrease in difficulty at block height 689,472.
Antpool comes first
At the time of writing, the Antpool Mining Pool is the largest mining entity Bitcoin in terms of the total reserved hashrate. 15.48% of the SHA256 BTC hashrate comes from Antpool, which is approximately 17.13 EH / s hashpower. Antpool is followed by Viabtc (14.87%), Binance Pool (11.00%), Poolin (10.18%) and the pool operated by Btc.com (9.98%). Today, these five communal pools capture 61.51% of BTC’s worldwide hashrate.
In addition, 9.98% of the global hashrate is owned by “unknown miners” with a hashpower of around 11.04 EH / s. From noon on Sunday, the current hashrate leads to numbers that assume that another change in difficulty will increase again.
Despite the increase in difficulty, BTC blocks are now 48% easier to find than before 13 May 2021. Estimates show that the difficulty is expected to increase again by around 1%. However, depending on the hashrate, the estimate may vary. Today, the difficulty is around 14.5 trillion and is expected to increase to 14.65 as the difficulty changes further.
