Bitcoin (BTC) difficulty and hash rate hit all-time highs as miner revenues increased.
The Difficulty of Miners to Extract Bitcoin Continues to Increase
Bitcoin's mining difficulty means how difficult and time-consuming it is to find a suitable hash for each block on the blockchain. This difficulty level increased by 2.23% with a block height of 784,224.
Mining difficulty changes approximately every two weeks as the network automatically adapts to changes in the hash rate.
The degree of difficulty changes to allow the network to continue processing blocks roughly every 10 minutes, rather than slowing down or increasing over time.
The increase in the difficulty of Bitcoin mining was the fourth increase in a row. An increase of 7.56% was seen on March 23, while the previous two increases were 1.16% and 9.95%. This increase means that the demand for BTC mining has increased and the network has become more reliable.
The latest block difficulty adjustment raised the difficulty benchmark to 47.89 trillion, another record high. As a result, mining a Bitcoin block is harder than ever.
The next difficulty adjustment will likely occur in 13 days.
While the average hashrate, or computational power, of the entire Bitcoin network hits a record high of 342.16 EH/s, average block times are less than ten minutes, how long it takes for miners to verify transactions and create a block on the blockchain.
Miners are rewarded with Bitcoin, the native currency of the blockchain, for generating valid blocks and executing transactions. Miner revenue takes into account inflation rewards and transaction fees.
Bitcoin miners made just under $732 million in March from their primary source of income, block subsidies.
Combined with transaction fees, they generated $755 million. While this figure has risen, their profitability remains well below their all-time high.
*Not investment advice.