Bitcoin’s mining difficulty rose 5% to a record of 150.84 billion on Wednesday, marking the seventh straight adjustment, according to Glassnode.
The difficulty, which restores each block of 2016 (approximately every two weeks), measures how challenging it is for miners to find new blocks and maintains the average block time of about 10 minutes.
The increase reflects the continuous growth in the hash rate of the network, now above a Zettahash at 1.05 zh/s. A higher hash rate indicates more machines that compete to ensure the network, which increases safety while the bar increases to obtain profitability.
This pressure appears in Hashprice, revenues of miners per unit of Hashrat, which has passed less than $ 50 through Petahash per second, according to Luxor’s data.
The metric briefly touched $ 52 when Bitcoin quoted above $ 118,000 earlier this summer, but since then it has been reduced as the difficulty increased and prices softened.
So that the margins of the miners improve, one of the three levers would need to move: higher rates, which remain at a minimum of several years, a rebound in the price of Bitcoin or a slowdown in the hash rate of the network.
Despite the record difficulty and the fall of hashprice, the mining shares have been recovered together with the increase in Bitcoin above $ 118,500, with Cified Mining (encryp) more than 51% during the last month, BIT Digital (BTBT) winning 25% and Digital Marathon (Mara) rises almost 16%
