Fast profits: bitcoin hash rate accelerates as mining difficulty reaches its highest point

The Bitcoin network hashrate has been operating at very high processing speeds for the past few weeks, as the overall hashrate reached a whopping 171.2 exahash per second (EH / s) on Monday. In addition, the network’s mining difficulty has also reached a historical record (ATH) of 20.61 trillion, the biggest difficulty the network has experienced in the past 12 years.

One aspect of the Bitcoin network (BTC) that people look to measure overall health and protocol growth is hashrate. At the time of publication, the BTC hashrate is processing at speeds of about 165.38 EH / s and the miner’s collective hashpower is approaching the peak again. For example, on December 30, 2020, the network hash rate reached a colossal peak of 178.6 EH / s and 12 days later the hash rate reached 171.2 EH / s.

What exceeded its ATH is the BTC’s network mining difficulty or the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA). This week, the mining difficulty is the biggest that Bitcoin has faced to date. After the significant drop in prices on Monday and the accelerated hashrate on the same day, the protocol pushed the mining difficulty to 20.61T.

As the hashrate is so high in the second week of January 2021, the Bitcoin network’s difficulty will increase + 9.98% or 22.66T, another ATH in less than two weeks. This will happen in approximately nine days from now, more or less, depending on the average production of blocks per day.

The BTC hashrate has greatly increased over the years, as the entire network hashrate was just one exahash per second in January 2016. On May 8, 2017, news.Bitcoin.com reported on the BTC network hashrate reaching 4,216,797,036 GH / s or more than 4 EH / s. Since then and during the 2018 and 2019 bear market, the Bitcoin hashrate has grown by more than 3,700%.

Before the reduction of the May block reward, bitcoin miners obtained 12.5 BTC per block found, but today, a bitcoin mining pool receives only 6.25 BTC per block reward. Today’s 165 EH / s is the aggregate hashrate of all 18 bitcoin mining pools that are “working” on the SHA256 “proof of work” consensus algorithm.

With a block reward found every ten minutes or more, the Bitcoin block inflation rate per year is just 1.78% during the first month of 2021. So far, even with this week’s BTC price drop, miners are still profiting a lot by dedicating hashrate to the chain. Statistics show that even at $ 0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), more than 200 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) devices that process the SHA256 algorithm are profiting today.

Bitcoin proponents are quite confident with the overall hashrate and security of the cryptocurrency network. In a discussion of BTC confidence, bitcoiner Pierre Rochard explained that if people are “confident about the fundamentals of Bitcoin, then the exchange rate volatility is just – a happy tune”.

Rochard too said:

Confidence in being able to send bitcoins. Bitcoin’s global peer-to-peer network and huge mining hashrate ensure that your bitcoin gets to where you are sending it without foreign interference.

Meanwhile, several dominant cryptocurrency exchanges are joining the mining industry. On Wednesday, reporter Colin Wu (@Wublockchain) discussed how Huobi is entering the mining economy. “China’s largest exchange, Huobi, is about to start selling BTC mining machines,” Wu said.

“Investors can purchase machines + custody services. The blocking period is two years. Chinese stock exchanges are entering the mining field more. The Binance mining pool, which was launched in 2020, has already placed second in the total BTC network, surpassing a large number of traditional mining pools, ”added the Chinese financial reporter.

What do you think about the increase in Bitcoin hashrate and the greatest difficulty of all time? Let us know what you think about this in the comments section below.

Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart, Btc.com,