Bitcoin’s hash rate has risen steadily over the past three months and has increased by over 40% after the network’s hash power fell below 90 exahash per second (EH / s) on July 5. The trend has led to a consecutive run of five bitcoin mining difficulty accruals with another increase expected during the next transition.
The hashrate increases steadily, Antpool orders in first position, hashrate returns unknown
Bitcoin’s overall hashrate (BTC) has increased slowly but steadily over the past 90 days. The network’s current processing power is coasting along at 130 EH/s, and three months ago the hashpower was 40% lower than today.
In the past 24 hours, Antpool has been the first dedicated hashrate mining pool on the BTC network with 29.7 EH / s or 20.47% of the global hashrate. Antpool is followed by F2pool with 23.58 EH/s or 16.2% of BTC’s overall hashrate, and Pooling captures 13.2% of the network or 19.2 EH/s.
Other major pools that devote large amounts of hashrate to the BTC network include operations such as Viabtc, Foundry USA, and Btc.com respectively. While Bitcoin.com News reported that the quantity of unknown hashrate had disappeared during the last hashrate report, a small fraction of stealth mining has recently returned. 1.86 EH / s or 1.28% of the world’s hashrate is currently owned by unknown mining entities.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Expected to Increase for 6th Time in a Row
As BTC’s hashrate has increased and mining pools have been shuffling around, the network’s mining difficulty is expected to increase for the sixth time in a row. At the time of this writing, it is expected to rise 2.99% to $ 19.57 trillion, approaching terribly close to the 20 trillion mark. Currently, BTC’s mining difficulty is 19.00 trillion. A 2.99% increase means that it will be 37% more difficult to mine bitcoin than on July 30.
The upcoming increase is similar in size to the difficulty increase two weeks ago which was roughly 3.16%. The biggest jump in the back-to-back series of difficulty increases came on August 25, at block height 697,536, when difficulty jumped about 13.24%. The consecutive run of mining difficulty increases follows the run of five consecutive difficulty adjustment algorithm decreases.
