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According to the results of the next recalculation on March 11, the complexity of Bitcoin mining reached another historical record – it increased by 1.16% and amounted to 43.55 Thesh. It is expected to grow again at the next recalculation, and even faster.
This isn’t good news for some in the Bitcoin mining industry, a larger mining difficulty means more advanced machinery, more computers, and more power might be needed to produce the same amount of Bitcoin. And if the price of Bitcoin isn’t rising at a comparable pace to the mining difficulty, this could make mining a less profitable business.
The last time record for the complexity of bitcoin mining was set on February 25 – at that time it reached 43.05 Thesh, and its predicted value after the next recalculation was 43.08 Thesh, that is, the actual result was higher. Bitcoin mining difficulty changes after all 2016 blocks have been mined, which happens about every two weeks.
This indicator increases with the growth of the computing power of mining equipment operating on the network. The measure is necessary to ensure that each block is mined in about 10 minutes. Once again, the difficulty is recalculated around March 24 – it is expected to continue rising to around 45.42 Thesh, ie 4.29% higher than the current indicator.
The average block mining time today is 9 minutes 53 seconds at an average hash rate – that’s the aggregate performance of all mining equipment on the network – at a current difficulty of around 311.69 Ehash/s, and that’s also a record.
On February 25, this value was 308.09 Ehesh/s. The increasing sophistication of bitcoin mining suggests new devices are being added to its mining network. Miners are not ashamed of the high price volatility of the largest cryptocurrency: in the last few days alone, it first fell below $20,000 and then surged above $24,000.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s hash rate, which measures the amount of computational power dedicated to mining the cryptocurrency, currently sits at 305.81 ExaHashes per second (EH/s). This figure is still below the all-time high registered on January 6 of 348.7 EH/S.
The current hash rate means Bitcoin miners are currently making over 305 quintillion codebreaking attempts every second in attempts to solve the computational equations needed to produce the proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency.
This time last year, Bitcoin’s hash rate was roughly 182.37 EH/s, making for a total increase of over 67% to the time of writing.
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