Mining Bitcoin Problems continues to rise: 37% more difficult to mine BTC than 3 months ago
Bitcoin’s hashrate is steadily rising over the past three months. It rose more than 40% when the network’s havehpower fell below 90 exahash/second (EH/s), on July 5. This trend has resulted in five consecutive bitcoin mining difficulty accruals. Another increase is expected during the next transition.
Hashrate Steadily Increasing, Antpool Commands Top Place, Unknown Hashrate returns
Over the past 90 days, the overall Bitcoin ( BTC ) hashrate has been steadily increasing over time. The current network’s processing power is 130 EH/s. Three months ago, the hashpower was 40% less than it is today.
Antpool is the most active mining pool that has dedicated hashrate to the BTC network in the last 24 hours with 29.7 EH/s, or 20.47% of global hashrate. F2pool follows Antpool with 23.58EH/s, or 16.2% BTC hashrate. Pooling captures 13.2% or 19.2 EH/s.
Other top pools dedicating vast amounts of hashrate to the BTC network include operations such as Viabtc, Foundry USA, and Btc.com, respectively. While Bitcoin.com News reported that the quantity of unknown hashrate had disappeared during the last hashrate report, a small fraction of stealth mining has recently returned. 1.86 EH/s or 1.28% of the global hashrate currently belongs to unknown mining entities.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Expected to Increase for 6th Time in a Row
As BTC’s hashrate has increased and mining pools have been shuffling around, the network’s mining difficulty is expected to increase for the sixth time in a row. At the time of writing, it is expected to increase by 2.99% to 19.57 trillion, getting awfully close to the 20 trillion mark. Currently, BTC’s mining difficulty is 19.00 trillion. A 2.99% increase will mean it will be 37% more difficult to mine bitcoin than it was on July 30.
The upcoming increase is similar in size to the difficulty increase two weeks ago which was roughly 3.16%. The biggest jump in the consecutive run of difficulty rises was on August 25, at block height 697,536, when the difficulty jumped approximately 13.24%. The consecutive run of mining difficulty increases follows the run of five consecutive difficulty adjustment algorithm decreases.
