Bitcoin Miners Welcome 2.65% Difficulty Adjustment Drop
Bitcoin miners breathed a sigh of relief after the difficulty adjustment took a 2.65% dip at the 806,400 block height. After holding its ground at a staggering 55.62 trillion for the last two weeks – this adjustment may very well signal an upswing for miner returns.
Consistent and dynamic, the Bitcoin network didn’t disappoint with its average hashrate: a whopping 386.2 exahash per second (EH/s) over the past fortnight. For those of you watching the charts, the numbers have been even more promising with the current global hashrate gravitating around 400 EH/s or, in simpler terms, 400,000,000 terahash per second (TH/s).
The next date in the difficulty adjustment is September 20, 2023, but we’ll have to wait and see which way it will go. These adjustments, for the uninitiated, can be pivotal in the mining profitability equation and the overall BTC supply and demand dynamic.
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Where Bitcoin’s At…
A snapshot of the current state of affairs: as of September 6, 2023, we’ve got 19,478,100 BTC circulating the ecosystem, leaving 1,521,900 BTC yet to be mined. In mining industry, Foundry USA is currently wearing the crown, as the dominant hashrate of 104.57 EH/s and accounting for a meaty 26.23% slice of the past 72 hours.
However, mining pool Antpool isn’t far behind, punching in with a 24.82% contribution and a 98.97 EH/s hashrate. For the record, there’s around 40 different mining pools all flexing their SHA256 muscles on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Now, for those crunching the numbers, there’s more good news. The hash price has seen a pleasant uptick. Rewind to August 29, and miners were raking in $60 daily for every petahash per second (PH/s).
Fast-forward to today, and that bounty has ascended to $61.72. With the way things stand, miners can look forward to a nifty $0.06173 reward for every TH/s they churn out.
What is Bitcoin’s Mining Difficulty Adjustment?
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty adjustment is a built-in feature of the Bitcoin network designed to ensure that the time taken to produce a block remains consistent, approximately every ten minutes.
This self-correcting mechanism adjusts the difficulty level of mining a new block based on the total computational power currently active on the network.
In essence, if there’s a surge in computational power because of more miners joining the fray, the difficulty increases, ensuring that blocks aren’t produced too quickly.
Conversely, if miners exit the network and computational power drops, the difficulty decreases, preventing the network from slowing down excessively.
The significance of this adjustment lies in its ability to maintain Bitcoin’s block time, irrespective of the number of miners or the advancements in mining technology. It’s a pivotal feature that underpins Bitcoin’s security, decentralization, and inflation schedule.
By adjusting roughly every two weeks (or every 2,016 blocks to be precise), it ensures that no single miner or conglomerate can easily dominate the mining process, and it keeps Bitcoin’s issuance rate predictable and steady.
