Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits Another All-Time High while BTC Trends Lower

 

Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty hit yet another all-time high (ATH) today, less than a month after the previous one, cutting into the decreasing profit margins of miners. 

The Bitcoin mining difficulty is the measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards – and today it went up by 5.56%, hitting 29.79 T, per data from the mining pool BTC.com. This is also the strongest increase since January this year. The previous ATH was seen on the last day of March, or two difficulty adjustments ago, when it reached 28.59 T. This one was followed by a smaller drop of 1%.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin hashrate, or the computational power of the network, has been on the rise as well. Since the previous difficulty adjustment two weeks ago, or April 14 more precisely, until April 26, the 7-day moving average hashrate has gone up almost 9%, per BitInfoCharts.com data. As a matter of fact, it hit its own ATH of 219.75E, compared to the previous high of 215.92E recorded in February this year.

In the same time period between the two adjustments, Bitcoin mining profitability dropped around 2%, while BTC corrected lower by almost 4% in two weeks. It went down from around USD 41,500 seen on April 14 to around USD 39,000 today.

The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is adjusted around every two weeks (or more precisely, every 2016 blocks) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. The 7-day moving average block time on April 26 was 9.23 minutes.

According to ByteTree data, over the past week, miners have held more of their newly generated BTC – 337 of them – compared to what they’ve spent. The situation changes when the 5-week and 12-week periods are observed.

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Learn more: 
– Another Bitcoin Solo Miner Wins the Block Race
– Bitcoin Mining Efficiency Up 63% in Year, ‘Sustainable Electricity Mix’ Jumped 59% – Bitcoin Mining Council

– American Bitcoin Miner Aims to Sell USD 30M Equipment in Russia to Avoid Sanctions
– US Sanctions Russian Bitcoin Miner BitRiver to Prevent Russia from ‘Monetizing its Natural Resources’

– Ripple’s Exec Campaign Has ‘Zero Chance’ of Forcing Bitcoin to Proof-of-Stake, But Brace for More Attacks
– ‘PoS Fanatics Attacking PoW are Actual Supervillains’, Kraken’s Powell Says as US Politicians Charge
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(Updated at 15:42 UTC with the latest difficulty data.)