This month bitcoin’s hash price tapped an all-time low of $66,500 per exahash on Oct. 25, according to statistics from the onchain market intelligence firm Glassnode. Alongside this, the network’s mining difficulty reached a lifetime high at 36.84 trillion on Oct. 23. Despite the high mining difficulty and the lower prices, Bitcoin’s total hashrate reached an all-time high at 325.11 exahash per second (EH/s) as 4,578 blocks were generated during the past 30 days.
Bitcoin hashrate sinks, hashrate hits lifetime high, difficulty hits new highs
As far as the 30-day percentage gains are concerned, the month of October saw “uptuber”, the month also saw some mining records. When the total hash rate of Bitcoin (BTC) reached 325.11 EH/s, the most notable block height was the all-time hash rate recorded at 758,138.
Bitcoin’s hashrate has remained above the 200 EH/s mark all month long, but reached a low of 215 EH/s on Oct. 10. The hashrate average over the last 2,016 blocks (roughly two weeks) was around 259.8 EH/s.
Bitcoin’s record high hash rate has made it so the network has experienced two difficulty changes this month that have increased. The first difficulty adjustment change was the biggest difficulty retarget in 2022, which jumped 13.55% to block height 758,016 on October 10th.
The second retarget in October took place on Oct. 23, as the shift increased upwards again by 3.44%. Both of these upwards shifts combined brought the network’s difficulty to a lifetime high at 36.84 trillion.
The next difficulty change is not until 6th November next month, and is expected to drop by 1.51%. Price-wise, while the crypto winter has been tough for bitcoin miners, October was the best month of the past three months for BTC prices.
Bitcoin gained more than 5% against the U.S. dollar during the 30-day span. During the last 30 days, bitcoin miners discovered 4,578 blocks which produced 28,612.50 newly minted bitcoins. Out of the 4,578 blocks, the top mining pool, Foundry USA, discovered 1,186 blocks.
In the last 30 days, the total hash rate of Foundry is equivalent to 25.91% of the global hash rate. Over the past month, bitcoin miners have made great strides by pushing hashrate and mining difficulty to record highs, while bitcoin’s hashrate has been at an all-time low in 14 years.
With all these factors, it will be interesting to see what happens to the hashrate and difficulty metrics when bitcoin’s hash price reaches higher prices, rather than the all-time lows recorded this month.
