Bitcoin Hashrate At ATH, Here’s How Difficulty Will Change

Data shows the Bitcoin 7-day hashrate has now reached a new all-time high. Here’s how the mining difficulty will reflect this change later today.

Bitcoin 7-Day Mining Hashrate Has Continued To Rise Recently

The “mining hashrate” here refers to a measure of the total amount of computing power that the Bitcoin miners have currently connected to the network.

When this metric rises, it means the miners are bringing in more machines online on the network right now. Generally, this kind of trend is a sign that these chain validators are finding it profitable to mine on the network currently.

On the other hand, decreasing values imply some miners are leaving the chain at the moment. Such a trend can suggest the miners aren’t finding it that attractive to mine the cryptocurrency.

Now, here is a chart that shows how the 7-day average Bitcoin mining hashrate has changed over the past year:

The value of the metric seems to have observed an increase in recent days | Source: Blockchain.com

As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin mining 7-day hashrate has seen an overall uptrend during the last few months. The sharp upwards momentum appeared to have come along with the start of the rally back in January.

Miners rely on the USD value of their rewards since they usually pay running costs like electricity using the dollar. Thus, BTC’s spot price rising, as it has during this rally, increases its revenue.

This incentivizes existing miners to expand their facilities, and it also attracts new miners to the blockchain. The improved revenue due to the rally has been one of the driving forces behind the current hashrate rise.

That’s not all, however, as the recent BRC-20 token craze meant that the transactions on the network sharply spiked, and this increased demand resulted in the fees also skyrocketing.

The fee revenue for these chain validators, which has generally stayed low on the BTC network over the years, saw a massive boost from this activity and further bolstered the miners’ revenue.

One of the quirks of the Bitcoin network is that it tries to keep the pace at which miners solve blocks to a constant level. The reasoning behind this is that the block rewards that this group receives for mining blocks are the only way to introduce new coins into the supply, so the production rate is essentially held constant this way.

The “mining difficulty” is a feature that controls how hard miners will find it to mine currently. If the hashrate rises, miners naturally become faster due to the increased computing power. So, to balance this out, the network also increases the difficulty just enough that the miners are slowed back down to the desired rate.

Because of the latest surge in the hashrate, the Bitcoin mining difficulty is set to go up in the next difficulty adjustment, which is scheduled to take place later today. According to BTC.com, the metric will go up by more than 3% in this adjustment.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $27,100, up 1% in the last week.

Looks like the asset has gone down in the past day | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Brian Wangenheim on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Blockchain.com