While bitcoin prices hover just below the $22K mark, the leading crypto asset has still shed more than 9% against the U.S. dollar during the last two weeks. Despite the lower prices, Bitcoin’s hashrate has jumped significantly in recent times and block intervals have sped up a great deal. The trend suggests that when the blockchain network’s difficulty changes four days from now, the shift could increase significantly higher as estimates show a 4.43% to 10.3% change.
Bitcoin’s hash rate climbs closer to June’s all-time high, ‘significant difficulty jump’ expected
At the time of writing, bitcoin’s hash rate is running hot at 282.21 exhash per second (EH/s), which is just 3.35% lower than the network’s all-time high (ATH) recorded at block height 739,928 on June 8, 2022. The hash rate has increased significantly, despite a 9% drop in price against the US Dollar in 14 days, and the mining difficulty has increased twice since August 4, 2022.
The crypto community has noticed the increased tempo as the block interval rate (the time measured in between every mined block) has increased. On Thursday, Blocksbridge Consulting tweeted about the block interval and said that the company expected a large difficulty increase during the next shift.
“The average bitcoin block interval between the current high (751055) and the last gap epoch (749952) is approximately 9.18 minutes,” Bloxbridge Consulting wrote on Thursday. “A remarkable difficulty jump is expected in less than 6 days.”
Furthermore, current statistics indicate the block interval time has dropped even lower and is 9:04 minutes at the time of writing. With the current data the next retarget date is expected to happen on August 31, 2022, with a possible increase of 10.3%. A 10% increase or more would make it a lot more difficult for miners to discover block rewards.
Not all difficulty and hashrate statistics are created equal, and because they are hard to measure in real time, estimates via btc.com’s difficulty page indicate a 4.43% difficulty increase over four days. Whether it is 4% or 10%, both are significantly larger than the previous two difficulty increases since August 4.
At current hashrate speeds, the likelihood of an increase is most definitely in the cards. Data shows that since yesterday, August 25, Bitcoin’s hashrate has increased by 44% during the last 24 hours. The rise has increased the probability that the network’s hashrate will see another ATH in the near future.
