Bitcoin Difficulty Reaches All-Time High, Hash Rate Up 45% in 6 Months
The Bitcoin network hit a new all-time high in mining difficulty after climbing steadily from lows last July.
Chain analysis tool CoinWarz reported on February 18 that the mining difficulty had reached a new high of 27.97 trillion hashes (T). This is now the second time in three weeks that Bitcoin (BTC) has hit a new ATH in terms of difficulty. On January 23, the difficulty reached 26.7 T when hash rates were 190.71 EH/s (exahashes per second).
Higher difficulty means there is more competition between miners to confirm a block and extract a block reward. As a result, miners have recently started selling coins or shares of their company to keep their cash reserves intact. Most notably, Marathon Digital Holdings filed on Feb. 12 to sell $750 million worth of stock in its company.
The network hash rate has also hit a new ATH according to data from Blockchain.com, indicating a hash rate of 211.9 PE/s. Different measurement tools have recorded different hash rates over the past few weeks. YCharts tools posted an ATH hash rate of 248.11 EH/s on February 13.
Of the known global mining pools, AntPool and F2Pool contributed the most hash power. Antpool accounts for 96 blocks mined in the last four days while F2Pool accounts for 93 according to data from Blockchain.com.
Regardless of the measurement tools used, the hash rate and mining difficulty have increased since hitting deep lows last July. At the time, the hash rate bottomed out at around 69 (EH/s according to CoinWarz) while the mining difficulty hit a low of 13.6 trillion hashes (T).
Related: ‘Up only’ for BTC fundamentals – 5 things to watch in Bitcoin this week
However, a higher hash rate means greater security for the network. The more hash power the network uses, the more work is distributed for each transaction performed on-chain. This dilemma between miners and securing the network and making enough profit is likely to continue to play out as they determine the feasibility of their current operations.
