Five days ago, Bitcoin’s hashrate had shown improvement as it increased 15% over the course of ten days and today, the computational power remains above the 200 exahash per second (EH/s) region. Meanwhile, bitcoin miners caught another break on Thursday, as the network’s mining difficulty adjusted downward for the second time in a row, making it 0.35% less difficult to find a block reward.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Drops for Second Consecutive Time to Block Height 727,776
At the time of writing, the computing power behind the Bitcoin (BTC) network stands at 213.27 EH/s, and for the majority of the time over the past seven days, the hashing power of BTC remained above 200 p.e./s. At block height 727,776 on Thursday, bitcoin miners paused when the network’s mining difficulty dropped by 0.35%. The 0.35% drop is the second straight decline after the network’s difficulty slipped 1.49% on March 3.
With the two difficulty drops combined, it is now 1.84% easier to find a bitcoin block subsidy than it was before March 3. On that day, the difficulty was 27.96 trillion and at the time of writing, Bitcoin’s network difficulty is 27.45 trillion. The downward drop on Thursday at block height 727,776 was a small shift downward, as it was expected to increase according to estimations recorded on March 13. While the difficulty has seen two consecutive decreases, prior to those adjustments, the difficulty increased six times in a row.
Foundry USA commands best position in mining pool this week, educated estimates assume mining difficulty could increase over next shift
Despite the difficulty decreasing by 1.84% over the past month, BTC’s mining difficulty is still the highest it has been in the lifetime of the network. The network’s unprecedented difficulty was the 27.96 trillion miners processed before the 1.49% drop to block height 725,760. Additionally, there are still 11 known mining pools dedicating hash power. to the network and about 2.35 PE/s of hashrate belong to unknown miners. Stealth miners – often referred to as an “unknown” pool – have found 12 bitcoin blocks over the past week.
Seven-day statistics indicate that Foundry USA was the week’s top bitcoin mining pool capturing 228 bitcoin blocks. Weekly metrics show Foundry USA commands 21.76% of the global hashrate, or 44.62 EH/s. The second-largest miner in terms of seven-day hashrate stats is F2pool as the pool acquired 141 bitcoin block rewards this past week.
The hashrate of F2pool represents 13.45% of the global hashrate with the 27.59 PE/s of pool hashpower. Foundry USA and F2pool are followed by Antpool, Poolin and Viabtc, respectively, in terms of the top five mining pools over the past week. With the current speed of the hashrate, it is estimated that the next difficulty change will take place in just over 12 days from now.
As mentioned above, the estimation of exactly when the adjustment will happen and how much it will decrease or increase is an educated guess made by leveraging current statistics. Estimations currently show the difficulty change in 12 days’ time could be a 0.57% increase. Although, by the time it gets closer, Bitcoin’s difficulty change could increase a lot more than that, or even experience another downward adjustment.
