While BTC’s Hashrate Remains High, It’s More Difficult Than Ever Before to Mine Bitcoin

At the end of January 2021, Bitcoin’s network mining difficulty, a measure of how complicated it is to mine a block reward, is higher than it’s ever been during the crypto protocol’s lifetime. Currently, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is a whopping 20.8 trillion but despite the handicap, bitcoin miners have continued to keep the network’s hashrate running hot.

Bitcoin Difficulty Touches 20.82 Trillion

Bitcoin (BTC) prices have been higher than ever before and despite the temporary dip on January 21 below the $30k handle, the crypto asset has managed to remain above that range. This has made it so a great number of ASIC mining machines are profiting at the current price per BTC including older generation mining rigs.

Nevertheless, the current Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty is the highest it’s ever been in the last 12 years of operation. The difficulty is essentially how hard it is for a miner to mine a BTC block or basically find a hash below a given target.

The higher the difficulty, the more complicated it is for all the mining participants trying to find bitcoin blocks on any given day. At the time of publication, public data shows the BTC chain’s difficulty is approximately 20,823,531,150,111 or 20.82T.

Small Difficulty Jump Expected in Less Than Two Weeks, Bitcoin Hashrate Runs Hot Above 150 Exahash

There’re around 22 mining pools dedicating SHA256 hashrate at the BTC chain and typically there were usually only around 18 most of the months last year. Presently, these pools have kept the BTC hashrate above the 150 exahash per second (eH/s) region.

During the last two months, BTC’s hashrate has held solid between 140 to 165 EH/s. At current speeds it seems the difficulty will only jump a hair higher at +0.11% to 20.85T in 12 days.

Right now the top five pools mining BTC today, include F2pool (23 EH/s), Poolin (19.2 EH/s), Binance Pool (17.1 EH/s), Btc.com (16.5 EH/s), and Antpool (12.4 EH/s). These top five mining pools command 61.45% of the entire SHA256 hashrate today, while 17 mining pools capture 38.55% of the remaining hashrate.

What do you think about the current mining difficulty touching a lifetime high? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

via Jamie Redman