Bitcoin mining difficulty hits fresh all-time high following record network hash rate

Bitcoin BTC -1.43% mining difficulty rose 3.6% on Wednesday morning to hit a new all-time high following record seven-day moving average hash rate levels over the weekend.

The difficulty adjustment came at block height 860,832, reaching a record of 92.67 trillion, according to blockchain explorer Mempool , breaching the prior peak of 90.67 trillion set at the end of July.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is not expressed in specific units. It is a relative measure of how hard it is to mine a new block compared to the easiest it could ever be. The difficulty automatically adjusts every 2016 blocks — roughly two weeks — to ensure that, on average, a new block is found every 10 minutes, regardless of how many miners are actively mining. The higher the difficulty, the more computational power and energy a miner needs to find the right hash for the next block.

When there’s an increase in the number of miners, the difficulty of mining bitcoin rises. Conversely, if there is a decrease in the number of miners competing to find new blocks, the protocol lowers the mining difficulty, making it easier for the remaining miners to discover blocks.

Bitcoin mining difficulty. Image: Mempool .

Bitcoin network reaches record total hash rate

Bitcoin's hash rate, which measures the total computational power dedicated to the network by miners, reached a new seven-day moving average all-time high of 693.84 EH/s on Sunday, according to The Block’s data dashboard .

Despite initially going into decline following Bitcoin’s fourth halving event on April 20, which saw block subsidy rewards halve from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, Bitcoin miners appear to be collectively ramping up their hash rate since bottoming out at a seven-day moving average of 550.25 EH/s on June 28.

Bitcoin miners saw a substantial decline in revenue following the halving, from a seven-day moving average peak of $72.4 million on the day of the event to the $25 to $30 million range since, squeezing out less efficient miners from the market.

This is also reflected in Bitcoin’s hash price falling to all-time lows of $0.04 this month. Hash price refers to the expected value of 1 TH/s of hashing power per day, quantifying how much a miner can expect to earn from a specific amount of hash rate.

However, as the surviving operators, dominated by U.S. public miners, begin to deploy new capacity , upgrade their mining rigs and consolidate market share, Bitcoin's total network hash rate is on the rise again.

Bitcoin is currently trading at $56,541, according to The Block’s Bitcoin Price Page , down 1.4% over the past 24 hours but remains up 33.7% year-to-date.