- The mining difficulty of Bitcoin presented an increase of 4.68% to rise to 39.55 trillion.
For a good to be valuable, it must have different properties and one of them is that it is difficult to obtain. What is easy to obtain is not usually precious, since it is within everyone’s reach. Achieving the rewards of Bitcoin is becoming more and more complicated, which will undoubtedly affect its market price sooner rather than later.
According to the medium DeCrypt, the difficulty of mining BTC, which represents the “computing power required to mine a single Bitcoin”, grew again. The last increase was 4.68% to rise to 39.55 trillion EH/s.
Does Bitcoin recover?
2022 has not been a good year for the Bitcoin price, with a significant loss in value. A year ago the price of bitcoin was around $40,000 per unit, while today it is in the range of $22,800, this represents a decrease of almost 43%. The comparison is even more painful when you consider that the all-time high is $68,000.
However, last year was “good” for mining, with difficulty growing month by month despite some ups and downs. On January 30, 2022, according to the data provided by CoinWarz, the mining difficulty was at 26.24 EH/s, while one campaign later it rose 50%.
The record that could not be broken in this new update is Bitcoin’s hash rate, which is the category that measures the amount of “computing power dedicated to mining the most popular cryptocurrency on the market.” This is at 305.81 EH/s, which is notably lower than the 348.7 registered on January 6, the day of a historical record.
How do you read these figures?
As the Decrypt medium points out, the current hash rate means that Bitcoin miners are making more than 305 quintillion decryption attempts every second to solve the computational equations necessary to meet the requirements and thus approve a block.
While it is positive that more miners are interested in getting their cut, which is currently 6.25 BTC every 10 minutes, the price of Bitcoin will play a determining role. If digital gold stays low, many will likely lose interest. The reason? A higher mining difficulty implies a higher investment to obtain the same (or lower) reward.
The crypto ecosystem has faced difficult events in recent months, such as the disappearance of the Terra ecosystem or the bankruptcy of FTX, and mining companies have not been the exception. Core Scientific, which is listed on the stock market, filed for bankruptcy in December, while the company Greenidge Generation, another giant, is not certain that it will be able to continue operating in this scenario.
To the “own problems” of cryptocurrencies we must add the external ones. The world is going through an unprecedented energy crisis and industrial energy has had global increases of close to 16% since 2021. For this reason, many companies seek to settle in cheap energy countries such as some in South America.
Bitcoin set a new record. And although it is not one of the most named or has a great impact on users, it does represent an advance for what promises to be the future of cryptocurrencies.
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