During the last month, Bitcoin’s hashrate has been coasting along above the 200 exahash per second (EH/s) zone, minus a number of drops here and there above and below that range. Following two difficulty changes that saw the difficulty decrease by 1.84%, the network’s difficulty is expected to increase 4.24% within the next 13 hours.
Bitcoin Difficulty Set to Reach All-Time High
Bitcoin miners took two breaks in the past month when the difficulty dropped twice in a row. The first drop of 1.49% occurred at block height 725,760 on March 3, 2022, and the second drop was a drop of 0.35%, which occurred at block height 727,776 on March 3, 2022. March 17, 2022.
The two consecutive drops made it 1.84% easier for all the mining participants to find BTC blocks. While the difficulty was 27.97 trillion prior to the two reductions, the current difficulty is 27.45 trillion on Wednesday morning at 8:00 a.m. (ET). Within the next 13 hours, the difficulty is expected to increase this time around, jumping 4.24% higher if current estimations are correct.
With an expected difficulty increase of 4.24%, the difficulty of the Bitcoin network will break records by reaching an all-time high (ATH). If the difficulty increases by 4.24%, then the difficulty will be 28.62 trillion for the next two weeks. Miners will face the toughest difficulty setting they have ever faced in their mining career.
Moreover, the difficulty changes that have taken place since January 1, 2020, after block height 610,848, moved at the fastest pace in the network’s lifetime. For instance, it took 4,015 days to get to a difficulty rating of 13.80 trillion, or over ten years. From that point after block height 610,848, with a difficulty rating of 13.80 trillion, it took only 820 days or just over two years to reach the current 27.45 trillion.
At the time of writing, the network hashrate sits at 204.27 EH/s and has remained high for the past two weeks. As the hashrate fluctuated, it reached a low of 153.97 PE/s on March 6 and a high of 246.88 PE/s on March 22. Meanwhile, the top mining pool on Wednesday is Foundry USA with 17.54% of the global hashrate. Foundry USA has 35.88 PE/s of hash power and has found 77 blocks in the last three days.
In terms of global hashrate positions, Foundry USA is followed by Antpool, Binance Pool, Poolin, and F2pool, respectively. Over the last 30 days, Foundry USA and Antpool have been the top two mining pools finding the most blocks (1,480 blocks combined) last month. It will be interesting to see how the mining pools deal with the upcoming difficulty ATH. Observers will be watching to see how bitcoin miners and the hashrate react to the epoch difficulty change.
