Bitcoin difficulty hits an all-time high, Hashpower’s 120 Exahashs remain strong

Network difficulty for the Bitcoin network increased by more than 9.8% on Monday bringing the difficulty to its highest point ever. The record high of 17.35 trillion makes it much harder for bitcoin miners to profit. However, the overall hashrate of the Bitcoin network has consistently remained above the 120 exahash per second (EH / s) zone.

On July 13, 2020, the Bitcoin (BTC) network saw its biggest difficulty metric ever, as it hit the 17.35 trillion level on Monday. Basically, difficulty is the value used to measure how difficult it is to find a hash below a target defined by the Bitcoin network.

The network has a global blocking difficulty and validated blocks must have a hash below the specified target. Essentially the less the difficulty, the easier it is to find blocks on the BTC network, and the greater the difficulty means that acquiring bitcoin through mining is much more difficult. The difficulty changes every two weeks depending on the hashrate speed or approximately every 2016 blocks.

The 17.35 trillion is the highest the difficulty has ever been, which means it is the most difficult time ever to mine bitcoin right now. Also, it was only recently, on May 11, 2020, when the block reward was halved and miners saw a 50% loss of revenue overnight.

Now the difficulty peak above 9.8% was not as big as the 14.95% jump on June 16, 2020. However, at that time the difficulty was only 15.78 trillion. The second biggest difficulty level occurred three days before the grueling March 12 market crisis, otherwise known as “Black Thursday”.

Despite the leap in difficulty to 17.35 trillion, BTC’s global hashrate remained high above the 120 EH / s range. There are 16 unique mining pools that hash on the BTC network and the best mining pool is F2pool.

This is followed by operations such as Poolin, Btc.com, Antpool and Huobi respectively. F2pool’s hashpower is around 16% of the network while Poolin has a touch of over 15%. The last three pools have around 10% or more of BTC’s entire global hashrate.

The rise in hashrate has made bitcoiners discuss the difficult situation of mining via social media and crypto forums. Many are conversing about the overall security of the BTC network and whether the hashrate will go down or up from here.

If BTC’s overall hashrate continues to climb higher, the difficulty will increase again in two weeks. If there is a substantial exodus of miners temporarily shutting down the machines, the difficulty will decrease after the subsequent blocks of 2016 are consumed.

What do you think of the difficulty of the Bitcoin network in jumping to its highest metric ever? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.

Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Btc.com, Blockchain.com,