Bitcoin miners have received their third break this year as the network’s mining difficulty adjusted downward by 1.26% on April 14 at block height 731,808. Currently, miners have more than 200 exahash per second (EH/s) in computational power dedicated to mining the Bitcoin blockchain as hashrate increased after the difficulty reduction. Additionally, bitcoin miners have another 108,160 blocks to go until the bitcoin reward halving that’s estimated to occur on or around May 3, 2024.
Bitcoin miners are taking their third break in 2022
Bitcoin’s Mining Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) fell on Thursday, as the parameter slid 1.26% to block height 731,808. The reduction is the DAA’s third drop in 2022, the difficulty having decreased by 0.35% on March 17 and by 1.49% on March 3. In 2021, the DAA fell seven times and saw one of the biggest reductions in Bitcoin’s lifetime on March 7, 2021, down 27.94% on that day. Since the change, BTC’s hashrate has increased and is currently just above the 200 PE/s zone.
The 1.26% drop makes it easier for miners to find blocks as the difficulty was 28.59 trillion two weeks ago and today, the metric is now 28.23 trillion. At the time of writing, there are 1,982 blocks left until the next DAA change. Currently, it is expected to increase but being that it’s roughly two weeks away, the estimate could be very different by then. The next DAA change is estimated to occur on April 28, 2022. The current block subsidy of 6.25 BTC is worth $252,781 using today’s BTC exchange rate and in 751 days, that will change.
Just over 100,000 block rewards until halving, other bitcoin mining pools join the fray
Bitcoin miners are getting closer every day to the block reward halving that is set to take place on or around May 4, 2022 (however, some estimates assume it could be May 3, 2022). After this date, BTC miners will see their 6.25 BTC per block halved to 3.125 BTC per block. Currently, the network produces 900 BTC per day (144 blocks) and Bitcoin’s inflation rate per year is 1.74% at the time of writing. So far, 90.53% of all bitcoins that will exist have been minted and there are 1,988,481.23 BTC left to be minted.
With the difficulty change making it easier to find blocks in comparison to the last two weeks, Foundry USA is the top mining pool over the last three days with 72 blocks found and 16.63% or 33.54 EH/s of hashpower. A few more pools have joined in recent days as there are now 14 known pools while two weeks ago there were only 11 known pools mining bitcoin. Currently, unknown hashrate or stealth miners command 1.39% of the global hashrate or 2.8 EH/s. Unknown hashpower has managed to acquire six blocks during the last three days.
