Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty has reached a historic milestone, climbing to an all-time high of 110.45 trillion.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits Record High, Marking Eighth Consecutive Positive Adjustment
This marks the eighth consecutive positive adjustment in difficulty and underscores the increasing competitiveness of the mining environment.
Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks, approximately every two weeks, to ensure that blocks are mined at a consistent pace of every 10 minutes.
The latest adjustment means that mining is currently 110.45 trillion times more difficult than it was when Bitcoin's first block was mined in 2009.
The steady increase in difficulty reflects the increasing hashrate, or computational power, of the Bitcoin network, which has averaged 775 exahashes per second (EH/s) over the past seven days. Analysts suggest the network could surpass 1 zettahash per second before Bitcoin’s next halving event.
Historical Context of Positive Adjustments
While consecutive positive adjustments are not unprecedented, they often coincide with key moments in Bitcoin's market cycles.
- Bull Market 2021: Following the mining ban in China, Bitcoin difficulty rebounded with nine consecutive positive corrections, peaking in November 2021 when BTC reached a new all-time high of $69,000.
- 2018 Bear Market: From the $20,000 peak in December 2017, the network recorded 17 consecutive positive adjustments, followed by a sharp decline to a low of $3,000 in late 2018.
These historical patterns suggest that long streaks of positive difficulty adjustments can signal impending cycle tops or bottoms.
Increasing difficulty creates challenges for miners as the rewards for successfully mining blocks become harder to obtain.
This has led some publicly traded mining firms, such as MARA Holdings (MARA), to diversify their operations, for example by issuing convertible bonds to mine bitcoin and optimizing their revenues through bitcoin lending.
Additionally, many mining companies are expanding into the high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) sectors to offset the decreasing margins in Bitcoin mining.
*This is not investment advice.
