Bitcoin Hashrate Climbs Six Times Higher Than 2017; It Has Never Been This Difficult To Mine BTC

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Has Reached Its Highest Point Ever.

Since Sept. 1, the Bitcoin mining difficulty has been at its highest level at 10.7 Th/s. The mining difficulty started surging in December 2018 at 5.2 Th/s and has doubled since then.

In October, when BTC price was around $6,000, the mining difficulty started falling and began climbing upwards only after Bitcoin bottomed out at about $3,200.

Source: Blockchain.com

Bitcoin mining difficulty is a relative measure of how difficult it is to find a new block. It is adjusted periodically in relation with the hashing power that has been deployed by a network of miners.

However, it won’t be this easy to mine Bitcoin for long.

The difficulty starts decreasing when it becomes too expensive to mine Bitcoin.

With bitcoin reward halving event coming up next year that will cut down miners’ reward into half, people are concerned about its effect.

Also, we saw Litecoin hash rate taking a serious drop after its second halving (which happened after the last halving as well).

But unlike LTC, the previous two Bitcoin halvings didn’t deter the miners.

Bitcoin network is still stronger than ever as the hash rate continues to make new highs every other day.

Hashrate is up nearly 6x since 2017 highs. We could lose all China miners tomorrow and bitcoin would be just fine. https://t.co/qh9c6QH8Dd

— Mati Greenspan (@MatiGreenspan) September 10, 2019

If miners decide they are not profiting anymore because of the halving, they will turn off their machines. This makes it longer to find the blocks but then the software adjusts the difficulty and the block finding time gets back to 10 minutes.

As such the difficulty drop to a point where miners start making profits.

Historically, the difficulty bottom starts a new market.

Also, after each all-time high, Bitcoin price drops until a good number of miners aren’t profitable. This leads them to switch off their hardware resulting in the hash rate dropping and difficulty to adjust downwards until miners become profitable again and difficulty rises.