Just two months after the third Bitcoin halving, the network's mining difficulty reached a new high, now becoming a much more powerful and secure network for the cryptocurrency and its users.
According to data shown by the blockchain explorer Bitcoin.com, the difficulty of the network Bitcoin It is currently positioned at a value of 17.345.948.872.516 (17,35 T), equivalent to 17,3 billion. This new increase represents a total of 9,89% compared to the values shown at the beginning of July, when the difficulty of the Bitcoin network had a value close to 15,8 T.
Likewise, statoshi.info, also reflects that the hash rate The network's throughput has increased considerably, reaching a value of 124,9 EH/s. Although there is no apparent reason for this increase in the network, as the price of the cryptocurrency has remained relatively stable with an approximate value between $9.000 USD and $9.200 USD, the truth is that this is good news for the crypto ecosystem and especially for those users and investors of the cryptocurrency.
It should be remembered that the third halving The Bitcoin halving, which took place on May 11, caused a drop in the Bitcoin network's hash rate and mining difficulty, a fact that worried many of its investors due to the halving of the reward. At that time, the network had a difficulty of 16,1 T and after the halving event, this fell to 13,7 T with a decrease of approximately 15%.
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What is Bitcoin mining difficulty?
As you probably already know, Bitcoin is much more than just a cryptocurrency; it is a system and protocol designed and programmed to operate in a decentralized and completely autonomous way, which means that there is no entity, organization, bank or government that manages, controls or regulates what happens in Bitcoin.
Even so, the consensus rules that allow Bitcoin to function autonomously through technology are written in the system code. blockchain and a network of nodes. interconnected with each other (p2p). In Bitcoin, anyone can join the network and contribute their computing power as a node or miner to strengthen its security. For its part, the pace of creation of new cryptocurrencies is carried out constantly and in a set period of time of 10 minutes. Thus, every 10 minutes, miners can extract a new block, include pending network transactions and collect their reward in bitcoins, which are the new currencies created by the system.
These two points are key to understanding the concept of mining difficulty. The more nodes or miners join the network, the more computing power or hash rate Bitcoin will have, therefore, mining new blocks will be much easier and faster. So, to get a new block mined in the set time of approximately every 10 minutes, the network sets an automatic adjustment to the mining difficulty, which is the value that determines how difficult or complex it will be to solve the system's hash to mine a new block.
Every 2.016 blocks the mining difficulty of the Bitcoin network is automatically adjusted to keep the mining time set at a value close to 10 minutes.
What does this increase in network difficulty mean?
As we mentioned earlier, the more miners join the network, the more the mining difficulty will be adjusted to maintain the established mining time. Thus, an increase in mining difficulty reflects a growth in investments in cutting-edge mining equipment joining the Bitcoin network, as well as an increase in the network's hash power.
In fact, the increase in mining difficulty is reflected after a spike at this last point, when Bitcoin's hash power reached 125 EH/s during the past week; thus, in this next adjustment, the difficulty increased based on the new hash power of the network.
Source: Bitcoin.com
For its part, although the new difficulty levels reflect greater security for the network and prevent to a greater extent a possible attack on the network due to difficulty and cost, they are also a new concern for miners with less sophisticated equipment, since They gradually become obsolete and unprofitable to continue mining activity.
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