Bitcoin’s hashrate has been riding high again as the processing power tapped another lifetime high on January 15, 2022, reaching 219.68 exahash per second (EH/s). The new record follows the previous all-time high (ATH) on the first day of the year, when the network’s hashrate tapped 219.5 EH/s.
Bitcoin Hashrate Reaches Milestone, Analyst Discusses Miners’ Capitulation and Estimated Cost of Bitcoin Production
Bitcoin miners devote a large chunk of SHA256 processing power to the BTC network on January 15, as the network quickly hit an ATH just after 12:00 a.m. EST. The record was just a hair above the previous ATH on January 1 at 219.5 EH/s while today’s hashrate peaked at 219.68 EH/s. At the time of writing, the hash power of the network stands at 199 PE/s.
The rise follows the recent drop in hashrate that happened while citizens of Kazakhstan revolted against the government and the internet was temporarily shut off in the country. It was widely speculated that the hashrate dropped 15% because of the issues in Kazakhstan but miners in the region claimed this was not the case. Data indicated at the time that BTC’s price drop and mining difficulty increase contributed to the 15% loss in hashrate.
In addition to lower prices and increased difficulty, estimates indicate that the production cost to mine a single BTC today is $34,000. Twitter account and analyst Company Founder recently explained that the production cost price is about 20% lower than the current value. “The worst dumps bitcoin has ever had was due to miner capitulation (December 2018, March 2020), when bitcoin fell below production costs, it risks miner capitulation,” the analyst said. . tweeted. The Venture founder added:
[Bitcoin] was at risk for miner capitulation at $30k in May. The current production cost is $34k, 20% below [the] current price.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Set to Rise 3.8% in 5 Days to Hit New All-Time High
While this was supposed to happen two weeks ago, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty will likely hit an all-time high during the next epoch change. The next difficulty change should occur in just over 5 days and estimates indicate that it could increase by 3.83% from today. If it reaches this point and hits 25.31 trillion, Bitcoin mining difficulty will hit another lifetime high.
The last mining difficulty ATH of 25 trillion was on May 13, 2021, and four difficulty decreases — including the largest epoch decrease ever — dropped the difficulty down a great deal. Since then, and after July 17, there’s been a total of 12 difficulty increases and just one decrease.
On Saturday, the largest bitcoin mining pool is F2pool with 15.57% or 28.88 EH/s and the second largest pool is Foundry USA with 15.55% or 28.80 EH/s. Both pools have gone back and forth over the past few weeks in terms of being the largest Bitcoin mining pool.
