Cold Shower For Sweating Bitcoin Miners in Sight as Hashrate Soars

Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty is estimated to hit another all-time high on Saturday and reduce mining profitability, as the computational power of the network is now up by more than 20% since the beginning of August.

Mining difficulty, or the measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, is set to jump by 12%, to 19.49 T, according to estimations by BTC mining pool BTC.com.

This would be the second-largest increase in more than a year after the measure dropped by 1.2% during the previous adjustment less than two weeks ago.

Also, the difficulty would be up by 21%, compared to what was before the third Bitcoin halving in May when the BTC block subsidy was cut in half to BTC 6.25 per block. However, BTC price jumped by around 28% in the same period of time.

The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is adjusted every two weeks (or more precisely, every 2016 blocks) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. According to Bitinfocharts.com, it has been moving between 8 and 10.5 minutes since the previous adjustment, standing below 8 minutes today, as the hashrate, or the computational power of the network, has kept rising recently.

Meanwhile, miners saved more BTC than they generated in the past week.

At the time of writing (13:37 UTC), BTC trades at USD 10,992 and is up by 2% in a day and almost 7% in a week, trimming its monthly losses to less than 7.5%. The price is up by 11% in a year.