BITCOIN MINING DIFFICULTY ADJUSTMENT
Hashrate slows down as Bitcoin’s rally cools off
Analyzing Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment and mining profitability
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The latest difficulty adjustment, effective at block height 776,160, decreased mining difficulty by 0.49%. In this overview, we’ll analyze the effects on mining and profitability.
Bitcoin’s total hashrate
During the last adjustment, we mentioned how hashrate tends to follow price, as it drives mining profitability for the most part.
Last time, however, price was increasing, and so hashrate was growing after it. This time, it happened the other way around.
As BTC fell from $23.2K to $21.6K in one week, hashrate hit a weekly average low of 269 EH/s. And although it has been gradually recovering, it couldn’t reach its previous all-time high, leading to a difficulty drop.
These factors have led to hashrate to average 280.26 EH/s at the time of the adjustment.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty
The swift recovery hashrate experienced after BTC’s sudden drop led it to almost the same levels of the previous adjustment.
As a result, difficulty barely changed — it dropped by merely 0.49%, reaching 39.16T. This drop broke a streak of two consecutive adjustments that had taken difficulty to a new all-time high of 39.35T.
Hashprice, or mining revenue per TH/s
As you know, the two most gravitating factors on mining revenue are price and difficulty.
Therefore, with the difficulty change being so small, revenue was mostly affected by the drop in Bitcoin’s price, leading to a considerable drop.
According to Coin Metrics, hashprice is now at $0.071. This constitutes a 7.79% drop from $0.077 — the hashrpice during the last adjustment.
The difficulty adjustment in numbers
- Difficulty adjustment block height: 776,160
- Date of the adjustment: 02/12/2023
- Average hashrate at the time of the adjustment: 280.26 EH/s
- Previous difficulty: 39.35T
- Current difficulty: 39.16T
- Difficulty change: -0.49%
- Miner revenue per TH/s (hashprice) after adjustment: $0.071
