The increase in mining difficulty occurs even though the hashrate is still high and the price of bitcoin has been falling all year.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty surpassed its previous record at block height 753,984 (from 30.97 trillion hashes to 32.05 trillion hashes). The network’s mining difficulty increased by 3.45% further on September 13 following two difficulty increases during the previous month.
Bitcoin (BTC), the most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is now much harder to mine. In reality, the network difficulty reached an all-time high on Tuesday, September 13, 2022, at 32.05 trillion. The difficulty printed the second-largest rise in 2022 when it grew by 9.26% around two weeks ago, or 2,016 blocks.
Bitcoin’s difficulty has never been higher than it is right now due to the rise at block height 753,984 as miners today need to do over 32 trillion hashes in order to find a new BTC block.
The difficulty increased significantly by 0.63% two weeks or 2,016 blocks prior to the most recent update. Furthermore, after the recently released U.S. CPI report, BTC’s value in U.S. dollars decreased by more than 9% on Tuesday afternoon (ET).
BTC’s hashrate has maintained above the 200 exahash per second (EH/s) level despite the recent difficulty increase and price decline, and as of this writing, it is at 227.07 EH/s. With 26.85% of the global hashrate over the last 24 hours, Foundry USA has been the network’s leading pool.
F2pool comes in second place behind Foundry with 15.4% of the global hashrate, followed by Binance Pool with 14.77%. Antpool (13.42%) and Viabtc (10.74%) are the next two pools, respectively, after Binance Pool. In the past 24 hours, 149 blocks have been mined; 40 of those blocks were found by Foundry USA, and 23 were found by F2pool.