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After the largest difficulty increase the Bitcoin network has seen in 2022, the network’s hashrate has not been affected by the 13.55% increase. In fact, five days ago, at block height 758,138, the network’s computational power surpassed the all-time high (ATH) recorded on October 5th, when it reached 325.11 exahashes per second (EH/s) on October 11th. Also, block generation intervals have been less than ten minutes per block, meaning that another notable increase in difficulty is expected to occur on October 23rd.
It’s been six days since Bitcoin’s last difficulty retarget, which saw biggest increase this year when the metric jumped 13.55% higher than the difficulty setting codified 2,016 blocks before block 758,016.
Despite the increase in difficulty and bitcoin’s (BTC) US dollar value falling to $18,183 on October 13, the network’s computational power has remained red-hot as another all-time high record (ATH) was recorded on 11 October.
That day, Bitcoin’s hash rate reached 325.11 EH/s at block height 758,138, which is an increase of 1.23% since hash rate ATH registered on October 5, at block height 757,214. At the time of writing, according to statistics from coinwarz.com BTC’s total hashrate is just above the 289 EH/s zone.
The up-tempo hash rate has meant that block times are significantly faster than the ten minute average. Data shows that the current BTC block generation time is around 8.22 minutes and if the fast block generation time continues, another pronounced difficulty increase is in the cards.
Even after the 13.55% difficulty, estimates indicate that on October 23rd the difficulty is expected to increase by 3.59% to 5.5%. In the last three days, 470 blocks were mined and mining pool Foundry USA captured 101 blocks of the total mined in 72 hours. Foundry commands 21.49% of the global hashrate or 57.08 EH/s.
In fact, the top three mining pools have more than 50 EH/s hashrate per pool, which means that three quarters of the chain’s computing power is supported by Foundry, Antpool, and F2pool. There are currently 12 known BTC mining pools dedicating SHA256 hashpower to the Bitcoin blockchain today, and 2.13% or 5.65 EH/s is controlled by unknown hashrate otherwise known as stealth miners.
Profits are still super tight for miners, and bitcoin mining is at an all-time low of under $70 per petahash per second (PH/s). With electrical costs at 0.05 nominal US dollars per kilowatt hour (kWh), a Bitmain Antminer S19 XP with 140 terahash per second (TH/s) makes a much smaller profit today at $1.43 per day in BTC profits.
What do you think about Bitcoin’s hashrate remaining red-hot and setting new records despite its lower price and high difficulty? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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