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As expected, Bitcoin mining difficulty increased this week, jumping 6.03% more on July 31. This change marks the first increase in five difficulty adjustment changes. This was after four downward difficulty drops made bitcoin mining 54% easier than before mid-May.
Bitcoin mining difficulty increases by 6%, difficulty is expected to increase again in 11 days
On July 31, at block 693,504, the difficulty of the Bitcoin blockchain adjusts according to the hash power dedicated to the network. The higher the hashrate dedicated to the BTC channel, the more the difficulty will increase every two weeks. On the other hand, if a large number of miners go offline and the dedicated hashrate decreases, the difficulty will decrease, making it easier for mining participants to find BTC blocks.
Bitcoin’s system and how it works are mathematically predictable, which is a marked difference from the shadow financial system in which the U.S. government and Federal Reserve have participated for decades. Because Bitcoin is transparent, we know that all blocks in 2016 the difficulty will change to keep the block generation time around 10 minutes. This means we know that at 1:00 p.m. EDT there are 1,782 blocks or 11 days left until the next difficulty change.
While the last four difficulty changes made it 54% easier to mine than before May 13, the difficulty increased for the first time in eight weeks by just over 6%. Indeed, the minors who went offline during the crackdown in China have apparently returned to some extent.
At the time of writing, the hashrate is over 100 exahash per second (EH / s) at around 114 EH / s on Sunday. This is much better than it was 33 days ago, when 90-day statistics showed the hashrate had fallen to 69 EH / s on June 28. This drop in hashrate resulted in a massive 27.94% drop in difficulty at block 689,472.
Antpool commands first place, unknown hash captures 10% of the network, a slight increase of 1% is expected
At the time of writing, Antpool mining is the largest bitcoin mining entity, in terms of dedicated global hashrate. 15.48% of BTC’s SHA256 hashrate comes from Antpool, which represents approximately 17.13 EH / s of hash power. Antpool is followed by Viabtc (14.87%), Binance Pool (11.00%), Poolin (10.18%) and the pool operated by Btc.com (9.98%). These five combined pools now capture 61.51% of the global BTC hashrate.
Additionally, stealth miners, or 9.98% of the world’s hashrate, are owned by “unknown miners” with around 11.04 EH / s of hash power. By mid-afternoon Sunday, the current hash rate leads the calculations to assume that the next change in difficulty will be an increase again.
Despite Saturday’s increase, BTC blocks are still 48% easier to find today than they were before May 13, 2021. Estimates show Sunday that the difficulty is expected to rise again in 11 days and increase about 1%. However, depending on the hash speed, the estimate may increase or decrease as the countdown gets closer.
Today the difficulty is around 14.5 trillion and should drop to 14.65 on the next change in difficulty.
What do you think of the recent increase in mining difficulty? Let us know what you think of this topic in the comments section below.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons
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