Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits New Record High, Rises for 5 Consecutive Cycles
Bitcoin's algorithmic mining difficulty continues to climb, with nearly six months remaining until the next halving event.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits New Record High, Rises for 5 Consecutive Cycles. Photo: Bloomberg
In the latest adjustment on the morning of November 13th, Bitcoin's mining algorithm difficulty surged by 3.55% to reach 64.68 trillion hashes. This marks the highest difficulty level ever recorded for Bitcoin.
The average hashrate of the Bitcoin network also rose to 479.78 EH/s, another all-time high.
Recent Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustments statistics. Source: BTC.com
Bitcoin's mining difficulty is a self-adjusting mechanism of the world's largest cryptocurrency network. Designed to maintain an approximately 10-minute block creation time, Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work algorithm adjusts difficulty based on the available mining capacity (hashrate) of miners. An increase in both hashrate and difficulty indicates more miners are joining the Bitcoin mining process. Difficulty adjustments occur approximately every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks.
Since the beginning of September 2023, this marks the fifth consecutive increase in Bitcoin's mining difficulty, coinciding with a significant recovery phase for the world's largest cryptocurrency, pushing BTC to new highs not only in 2023 but also since early May 2022, before the LUNA-UST crash.
Bitcoin mining difficulty (in blue) and BTC price (in black) fluctuations since December 2020. Source: Blockchain.com
Meanwhile, Bitcoin edges closer to the upcoming halving event scheduled for April 2024. Halving is another automatic mechanism of Bitcoin, designed to create deflationary pressure on the currency. Every 210,000 blocks, mining rewards are halved. In the upcoming halving, block rewards will decrease from the current 6.25 BTC to only 3.125 BTC.
Bitcoin has historically experienced three halving events, each followed by a new growth cycle for the cryptocurrency. Therefore, market consensus often anticipates halving as the event marking the shift from downtrend to uptrend in the market.
The next Bitcoin halving event is scheduled for April 23, 2024. Source: Blockchair
