Last week, the bitcoin hashrate hit a new record after massive growth. While this was a welcome development, it had significant implications for the next mining difficulty adjustment that took place on Monday. As expected, the difficulty adjustment was up by double digits, surpassing even the highest predictions.
Difficulty adjusted by 13.5%
In the past week, predictions for bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment brought it to a peak of
9-12%. These ranged from the conservative side to the worst-case scenario, but either way, the network would mark the highest-difficulty customization yet for the year 2022. But even these predictions didn’t do justice to the actual adjustment.
On Monday, the mining difficulty (how many hashes it takes to mine a BTC block) jumped from 31.36T to 35.61T, up 13.5%. This higher difficulty adjustment is in line with increasing mining power as more bitcoin miners bring their machines online.
Mining difficulty adjusts by 13.5% | Source: Coinwarz
Interestingly, the difficulty for bitcoin mining is not expected to decrease anytime soon. The next difficulty adjustment will take place on Sunday, October 23, 2022, with another expected increase of 11.3%. Mining difficulty is expected to increase by 22.5% in the next three months.
As for the bitcoin hashrate, it has fallen slightly since hitting its all-time high of 321 EH/s. It currently stands at 291.4 EH/s at the time of writing, a high number for the year 2022.
Will Bitcoin Miners Dump BTC?
The high-difficulty customization will no doubt affect bitcoin miners’ profits during this time. This means they would have to send more computing power and more energy to mine a block, impacting their bottom line. Add to that the fact that bitcoin price is struggling to stay above $19,000, and miners are in a tight spot.
BTC settles above $19,000 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
Since the beginning of the year, there have been times when some bitcoin miners have had to dump their BTC holdings to fund their operations and this adjustment could spark a new sell-off trend among them. Since it costs them just over $18,000 to mine a single BTC, bitcoin’s tap dance below $19,000 brought them perilously close to taking losses on their mining rigs, which could lead to sell-offs.
Bitcoin miners’ income currently stands at $17.16 million per day. With 6.25 BTC mined at an average of 10 minutes, miners produce a total of 900 BTC every day.
Featured image from Bloomberg, chart from TradingView.com
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