The difficulty of mining bitcoin has risen significantly after the next recalculation this Friday. The increase relative to the previous two-week period was 5.82%. As a result, the indicator was at a new high of 23.14 T.
This is the largest percentage change since January 9th.
The observed dynamics speaks of the addition of new computing power to the bitcoin network. So, the average hash rate in 14 days increased from 156 EH / s to 165 EH / s. The increase of 9 EH / s corresponds to 90 thousand pieces of the latest generation equipment, for example, AntMiner S19 Pro from Bitmain.
The recalculation of the difficulty of Bitcoin mining is laid down at the level of the algorithm and occurs every 2,016 blocks or, on average, once every two weeks. This allows the block release rate to be kept relatively constant regardless of fluctuations in the amount of computing power on the network.
In February and March, miners took advantage of the low rate of increase in the difficulty of mining cryptocurrency compared to the growth of its rate. March turned out to be a record month for Bitcoin miners in terms of income – its size exceeded $ 1.5 billion.
“In September 2020, few could imagine the magnitude of the current recovery. Then the monthly income of miners was $ 329 million. This is an increase of 373%, – writes the analytical firm Arcane Research.
The current growth in profitability is a reward for those miners who already had everything ready before the rise or who had an excellent forecast of events back in the third quarter of 2020 ”.
The network hash rate is forecast to increase substantially in the second quarter thanks to new equipment shipments ordered at the end of last year.
“Today’s moderate-to-large increase in difficulty is not surprising. I guess these are just echoes of what we have to see this year and next as delayed hardware shipments begin to arrive. The expected influx of hashrate to the market will only continue to push the difficulty of Bitcoin mining upwards. It has to match the price, «said Whit Gibbs, CEO of Compass mining company.
