Bitcoin mining difficulty reached an all-time high on October 10, which means that it is more difficult than ever to mine the leading crypto asset. After reducing the difficulty on September 27, the network’s mining difficulty increased by 13.55% at block height of 758,016 printing the highest difficulty rise recorded this year.
13.55% Bitcoin Block Reward Now Hard to Detect, As Network Mining Difficulty Reaches All-Time High at 35.61 Trillion
Five days ago, Bitcoin’s hash rate reached an all-time high (ATH) when it exploited 321.15 exahs per second (EH/s) at block height of 757,214. While the hash rate was much higher, the block finding speed was less than ten minutes per period. When blocks are mined faster than usual, after 2016 blocks have been mined, adjusting network difficulty reroutes it with increasing difficulty. And vice versa if blocks are detected very slowly during the 2016 block period (two weeks), the difficulty will decrease.
After clicking on the ATH tick on October 5, block times remained faster than the 10-minute average and on October 9, block times were spread out by 7:65 minutes. At the time of writing, even after the recent difficulty increase, the bitcoin block generation times are around 8.7 minutes. Furthermore, the current hash rate after changing the difficulty is around 244.03 EH/s. The 13.55% difficulty rise was the most noticeable and largest increase in 2022 so far, according to records, with the second largest increase (9.32%) occurring on January 20, 2022.
The recent rally pushed the network’s difficulty above the previous difficulty level recorded on September 13th at 32.05 trillion. Today, after resetting the target, the current difficulty is 35.61 trillion and will remain at this coefficient for the next two weeks. Currently, the largest mining pool on Monday, October 10, is Foundry USA accounting for 29.22% of the network’s total hash rate. Foundry has approximately 75.87 EH/s allocated to the BTC blockchain and the pool has discovered 149 out of the 510 blocks found over the past three days.
Antpool is the second largest mining pool with 20.39% of the global hash rate or approximately 52.95 EH/s. The mining pool operated by Bitmain, Antpool, has discovered 104 of the 510 blocks discovered in the past three days. Statistics show that there are 12 miners known today allocating a SHA256 hash towards the BTC chain. The unknown hash rate, also known as hack miners, commanded 5.09 EH/s on Monday, or 1.96% of the total recorded hash rate. Of the 510 blocks found in 72 hours, ten block rewards were found with an unknown hash rate.
With bitcoin prices dropping dramatically, the network’s mining pools are making lower profits amid the highest difficulty rating recorded in more than 13 years. Before the last change, mining revenue per pethashes per second (PH/s) was around $80 per PH/s and today it’s $70 per PH/s. At $0.12 per kWh, only three rig models are profitable and at $0.07 per kWh in electrical costs, approximately 35 rig models benefit today.
What do you think about increasing mining difficulty targeting over 13% and reaching ATH on October 10th? Tell us what you think about it in the comments section below.
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Originally published at San Jose News Bulletin
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