Mining a bitcoin is now harder than ever. Mining difficulty, one of the key metrics of the blockchain network, has reached a new all-time high, surpassing 35,6 trillion (T) or billions currently.
This Monday, Bitcoin mining difficulty increased exponentially.
According to statistics from the CoinWarz platform, the difficulty of mining a bitcoin has reached a new all-time high, standing at 35,61 trillion (T) or trillions currently. This increase, which occurred at block height 758.065, represents a jump of no less than 13,55% with respect to the mining difficulty that the blockchain network had maintained since the end of September.
It is also the largest difficulty increase Bitcoin has seen since May 2021.
Is Bitcoin mining profitable again?
The increase in Bitcoin mining difficulty suggests that new miners have connected to the network since its last difficulty adjustment. It is possible that BTC mining has become profitable again for miners, so many are connecting their equipment back to the network, even though the price of BTC remains below $20.000 per unit at the time of writing.
The CoinWarz platform shows that the Current Bitcoin hash rate is 291,00 exahashes per second (EH/s); which represents a 37% increase in the blockchain network’s computational power over the past two weeks. This also suggests that the Bitcoin network is experiencing a high level of activity, currently.
Source: CoinWarz
Bitcoin's mining difficulty is expected to have its next adjustment on Saturday, October 22, increasing its current difficulty level by 12,78% to around 40,16 trillion (T).
What is Bitcoin Mining Difficulty?
Bitcoin mining difficulty is a unit of measurement that references how difficult it is to solve the complex mathematical processes required to mine a new block on the blockchain.
This metric is automatically adjusts on the network every 2.016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks, allowing the Bitcoin network to ensure that each new block is generated within an average time of 10 minutes.
Although the hash rate can go up or down at any given time, over time this value has been on the rise, increasing dramatically since the early days of Bitcoin. Previously, it was possible to mine a bitcoin using a regular computer. However, today, specialized equipment called ASICs are required, which can solve millions of operations per second to overcome the complexity of the network and be able to extract a new block.
It is thanks to the complexity guaranteed by the mining difficulty and its periodic automatic adjustment that Bitcoin can continue to mine new blocks and bitcoins in the time determined by its protocol, every 10 minutes, no matter how many computers are connected or how powerful they are. In addition, both the increase in mining difficulty and hash rate ensure that the blockchain network is increasingly secure.
Continue reading: They find the oldest and most original copy of the Bitcoin code, uploaded in 2009
