- Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell by 7.32% over the past two weeks, the largest negative adjustment in almost 18 months.
- Mining difficulty adjusts approximately every 2,016 blocks. This is roughly two weeks. It also depends on the average block duration (10 minutes) as well as hashrate.
- Bitcoin’s next mining difficulty is expected to increase by 4.24%.
Bitcoin mining difficulty, a measure of how hard it is for miners to find and ‘mine’ a new block, fell by 7.32% last week.
The downward adjustment occurred at block height 766,080, the largest negative adjustment in the metric since July 2021. On 15 December 2022 the following information was available: according to data on BTC.comThe block height 689,472 was the highest downward adjustment, which occurred in July 2021, when difficulty dropped by 27.94%
Incidentally, that negative adjustment is the largest in Bitcoin mining history and happened at a time when the crypto industry recorded a massive exodus of miners from China following the country’s crackdown on Bitcoin. Other significant downward adjustments were made in May 2021 and March, November 2020, and December 2018.
Next difficulty to rise 4.24%
Mining difficulty refers to the number of guesses or hashes that a miner must make in order to find the right one to be able mine BTC. It’s been increasing since Bitcoin’s inception and adjusts every two weeks, or after about 2,016 blocks – going up or down to keep the creation of new coins within the network’s average block time.
The current difficulty is 34.24 T. and the next difficulty adjustment will rise by 4.24% to an estimate 35.69 T.
How does mining difficulty work
This is how difficulty works – it will adjust downwards if it takes less than 10 minutes to create a new block, or upwards if the average block time is above 10 minutes.
Also critical to difficulty adjustment is Bitcoin’s hashrate, which is the total computing power of all the miners on the network. Hashrate rises with an increase of miners who dedicate their computing power processing transactions and protecting the network.
Miners who are less active in the network cause their metric to fall. This means that the difficulty adjustment is higher for miners who join the network. Conversely, the difficulty adjustment falls for miners who switch off their equipment.
Bitcoin’s hashrate has increased slightly from 245.10 exahashes per second (EH/s) at the last difficulty adjustment, with on-chain data showing its currently at 257.04 EH/s.
