Bitcoin Mining Difficulty to Jump Again As More Miners Return to Work

Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty is expected to go up again in less than a day, following the last adjustment’s important increase.

The relevance of the previous increase is not so much in the percentage, which was 6%, but the fact that it had broken the second-longest drop streak in Bitcoin’s history. Now, the increase streak is about to form.

Bitcoin mining difficulty, or the measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, will go up almost 8%, according to the current (08:44 UTC) estimates by Bitcoin mining pool BTC.com.

This would bring the difficulty to 15.62 T – the level it last saw back in June 2020. Between then and May 2021, the difficulty has been rising, hitting the all-time high of 25 T in mid-May, when BTC dropped from USD 50,000 to almost USD 30,000. This means that there is still a while to go before it surpasses its peak again.

Per BitInfoCharts.com, hashrate, or the computational power of the network, has been on a steady increase since July 3. Since the previous adjustment on July 31, hashrate (7-day simple moving average) went up just above 5%. It is now back at the level seen in the second half of June, as it was dropping from its all-time high.

Bitcoin mining profitability has also been on a rise. The 7-day simple moving average chart shows it increasing more than 6% over the past two weeks, since the previous difficulty adjustment.

The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is adjusted around every two weeks (or every 2016 blocks, to be precise) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. The 7-day simple moving average block time on August 11 was 9.1 minutes.

Also, According to ByteTree, in the past weeks, miners have continued holding more of their newly generated BTC, instead of spending it.

At 8:46 UTC, BTC trades at USD 45,316. It’s down almost 2% in a day, and up 14% in a week.
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