The price of bitcoin (BTC) may have fallen to six-month lows this week, but under the hood, the network is stronger than ever.
Data from on-chain monitoring resources, including glass node and BTC.com, confirm that as of Friday, the Bitcoin network difficulty is at a new all-time high.
Difficulty exceeds 26 billion for the first time
The difficulty, which expresses how much miners have to work to solve the equations to process transactions on the blockchain, it is possibly the most important of the fundamental components of the Bitcoin network.
Metric automatically adjusts to increase or decrease mining effort based on miner engagement: The more competition there is between them, the higher the difficulty.
This has the effect of keeping mining stable regardless of factors such as sentiment, price, or unintentional incidents.
After falling in mid-2021, it took the rest of the year for the difficulty to recover, with the latest automated reset adding 9.32% to the previous level. With this, he entered uncharted territory above 26 billion.
Commenting on the event, the cryptocurrency journalist and commentator Colin Wu he pointed that the increase is the highest in more than half a year, and that data from BTC.com confirms that the last adjustment of more than 10% took place at the end of August.
BTC Price Drop Fails To Kill Miners’ Resolution
The difficulty logically followed the hash rate, which last year continuously reached new records.
The hash rate, an estimate of the processing power dedicated to the blockchain by miners, currently stands at 192 exahashes per second (EH/s), after briefly reaching 218 EH/s on January 10, according to MiningPoolStats.
As Cointelegraph often reports, An old mantra among former miners is that “price follows hash rate”, but this trend is taking a backseat for many as fundamentals move in the opposite direction of spot price.
The increase in the hash rate implies, therefore, that in longer terms, the optimism of the miners about the profitability of their operations remains.. Calculations from last week revealed that its break-even point is around $34,000.
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