The difficulty of mining Bitcoin is a new all-time high of 142.3 trillion, marking a 29.6% increase since the start of the year.
Mining Difficulty is the average measure of the number of hash functions that the miner needs to calculate to min a single block, indicating that as it rises, mining is more computationally intensive.
The difficulty is readjusted every 2,0116 blocks to accommodate increased (or reduced) the hash power of the Bitcoin network.
Therefore, Bitcoin hashrates raises a new record moving to a hash of 1.09 Zh/s, or 1,090,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The latest milestone comes just a week after Bitcoin mining difficulty reaches a record high of 136.04 trillion.
These peaks are Bitcoin And the network relates to CJ Burnett, the Chief Revenue Officer of Compass Mining. Decryption Its difficulty adjustment is one of Bitcoin’s “most elegant and underrated” features.
“This allows the network to readjust itself, making it almost like a self-regulating living organism,” he said.
A competitive mining sector
For Burnett, increasing difficulty is a sign of a healthy and competitive mining sector.
Like half of Bitcoin, he said the rise in difficulties “often forces less efficient miners to go offline, and specialised miners with strong infrastructure and low-cost energy could thrive.”
There are concerns that mining could be less cost-effective for some companies due to increased difficulty, but it’s high and rising Bitcoin Price Experts argued that it would offset the increase in operating costs.
Digiconomist Founder Alex de Vries said Decryption Improved hardware efficiency can weaken the correlation between difficulty and power consumption, thereby reducing costs for miners.
“When a new generation of mining equipment comes online, the amount of power consumed per unit of calculation is reduced,” he explained. “This means there is only an indirect relationship between hashrate and power consumption. Technically, the hashrate can continue to rise, but overall power consumption is constant.”
Miners stay online
So, the increasing difficulty of Bitcoin may not immediately become a professional miner offline, especially if Bitcoin prices continue to set new record highs like last month.
“There is a more direct relationship between mining revenue and electricity consumption. As increased revenue allows miners to spend more on electricity regardless of the efficiency of their equipment (higher efficiency means they can run more machines on the same budget),” added De Vries.
More generally, the increase in difficulty is a sign of how strong and secure the Bitcoin network is, and how difficult it is to elicit a scary 51% attack, as was attempted with the Monero network last month.
“There’s a very strong correlation between hash power and mining difficulties,” Burnett said. “As they grow, the network becomes more secure and difficult to attack.”