Bitcoin (BTC) enters a new week with a price that is still below $20,000, a week that is expected to provide investors with the excitement they have been seeking.
The difficulty of mining a bitcoin (BTC) block is expected to experience yet another significant hike today, which will have the effect of further compressing profit margins.
This comes at a time when the market is already struggling, making the situation even more difficult for bitcoin miners.
The current consensus among analysts is that Bitcoin’s mining difficulty will increase by a massive 13% on October 10 — the most significant increase since August last year — and that this may easily propel the cryptocurrency to new all-time highs.
Explanation
Automatic adjustments are made to the metric in order to maintain the time required to mine a Bitcoin block at approximately 10 minutes.
This time is determined by the hashrate of the network, which refers to the amount of computing power that has been committed to mining Bitcoin and securing its blockchain.
The greater the hashrate, the greater the difficulty, which in turn reduces the profitability of mining operations.
The total hashrate of Bitcoin reached an all-time high (ATH) only recently, at block height 757,214, which was mined on October 5, 2022.
The ATH was measured in exahashes per second (EH/s). Recently, the block intervals have been much quicker than normal and have been significantly below the average of 10 minutes.
The level of difficulty is determined by the rate at which the 2,016 blocks must be located in between difficulty changes, and the present block intervals signal that a significant increase in difficulty may be on the horizon.
Now, in advance of the subsequent increase in difficulty, the hashrate has remained to be high, and block times, as of the time this article was written, are around 7:65 minutes.
According to statistics provided by CoinWarz, the block time on the Bitcoin mining network is now somewhere around 9 minutes, which is much quicker than the projected 10 minutes.
Despite the fact that there is still some time left for adjustment, it is anticipated that the difficulty will increase by more than 10% from 32 trillion.
