The 13.55% increase in difficulty has not affected the Bitcoin network’s hashrate, which has been experiencing the greatest difficulty increase since 2022. Five days ago, at block height 758.138, the network’s computational power exceeded the all-time high and reached 325.11 EH/s on October 11. Block generation intervals are now less than ten minutes per block.
This means that another significant difficulty increase is likely to occur on October 23.
325 EH/s – Bitcoin’s Hrate Taps another ATH After the Last Difficulty retarget
Six days have passed since Bitcoin’s last difficulty target. This was when the biggest rise took place. As a result, the metric rose 13.55% higher than the difficulty setting codified 2,016 block blocks before block 758.016.
Despite bitcoin’s difficulty rise and its ( Bitcoin) U.S. Dollar value dropping to $18,183 October 13, the network has continued to be hot as another all time high record (ATH), occurred Oct 11.
Bitcoin’s hashrate was 325.11 EH/s at block 758,138 on that day. This is 1.23% more than the hashrate record ATH October 5, at block 757,214. According to statistics sourced from coinwarz.com at the time of writing BTC hashrate total is just above 289 EH/s.
Block times are significantly faster than the average ten-minute block time due to the high hashrate. The BTC block creation time at the moment is 8.22. If this speedy block generation continues, then another significant difficulty increase could be in store.
Even with the 13.55% difficulty increase, it is predicted that the difficulty will rise by 3.59% and 5.5% on October 23. The mining pool Foundry USA took 101 blocks from the total of 470 blocks mined over the past three days. Foundry controls 21.49% or 57.08 EH/s of global hashrate.
The top three largest mining pools have over 50 EH/s each pool. This means that three quarters of the chain’s computational power are backed by Antpool, Foundry and F2pool. There are currently 12 BTC pools that dedicate SHA256 hashpower to the Bitcoin blockchain. 2.13%, or 5.65 EH/s, is controlled by unknown stealth miners.
Miners are still making very marginal profit and bitcoin mining profits are currently at an all-time low of $70 per petahash (PH/s). A Bitmain Antminer XP with 140 Terahash per Second (TH/s) of electricity costs of 0.05 U.S. Dollars per Kilowatt Hour (kWh), earns a smaller profit at $1.43/day in Bitcoin profits.
