Bitcoin Mining Hashrate Triples In Two Months, Difficulty To Rise 12% Soon

On-chain data reveals Bitcoin mining hashrate has trippled in the past two months. Miners can expect the difficulty to rise 12% soon.

Bitcoin Mining Hashrate Is Now 152B GH/s

As pointed out by a CryptoQuant post, the mining hashrate of the cryptocurrency continues to recover from the crash. Currently, the metric’s value stands around 152B GH/s.

Since Bitcoin uses the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism to reach consensus, validating nodes require a lot of computing power to participate in the network. The mining hashrate shows the total amount of this computing power present in the entire BTC network.

Related Reading | Ethereum Miners Can Now Use 70% Of Nvidia RTX 30 GPU Hashrate, Thanks To This NBMiner Update

The indicator helps assess the strength of the network. More the value of the metric, higher the security, and thus harder it is for there to be a possibility of malicious attacks.

Now, here is a chart showing the trend in the value of Bitcoin mining hashrate over the past year:

The BTC mining hashrate gradually recovers | Source: CryptoQuant

As the above graph shows, the Bitcoin mining hashrate collapsed during June of this year, and hit a low of 52B GH/s towards the end of the month.

Since then, the indicator has been on the path to recovery, and now it has hit 152B GH/s, almost triple the value of the plunge.

The Reason Behind The Crash And Why US Miners Benefited From It

China’s crackdowns on Bitcoin mining earlier in the year are the reason behind the crash in the network hashrate. The nation forced its miners to shutdown operations, and since a big part of the global hashrate resided in the country, the effects on the network were profound.

Since mining difficulty is directly correlated with the amount of computing power in the network, its value dropped after Chinese miners had to take their farms elsewhere

Related Reading | Nvidia RTX 3060 GPUs Being Sold For As Low As $270 By Miners As China’s Crackdowns Continue

This meant that while these miners were migrating to other countries, miners already present in nations like the US were able to rake in bigger profits thanks to the lower difficulty.

Now that the migration is almost complete, difficulty has also been gradually going up. The next rise in the difficulty should be about 12%, and it will be approximately in a day from now.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $48.5k, up 4% in the last 7 days. Over the past month, the cryptocurrency’s value has increased by 42%.

The below chart reveals the trends in BTC’s price over the last three months:

Bitcoin's price quickly falls down after a touch of the $50k price mark | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Unsplash.com, charts from CryptoQuant.com, TradingView.com