11 Oct 2022
Bitcoin’s hashrate explodes, resulting in significant difficulty adjustment
After a period of surging hashrate and a high block production rate, we got a significant change in mining difficulty this week, with an increase of 13.55% - the highest since May 2021.The Bitcoin hashrate continued its push higher last week, peaking at a new record 7-day average of 258 EH/s.
The massive increase in hashrate lately resulted in the largest difficulty increase since May 2021. If the bitcoin price stays around the same levels for the rest of 2022, it’s not unlikely that we just saw the peak hashrate of the year.
The surging hashrate saw the block production rate climb close to 7 blocks per hour last week – an uncommon observation and far from the 6 blocks per hour target. This week’s mining difficulty adjustment will show us the beauty of the bitcoin network, as the block production will move back to its target level without any centralized alteration, just code.
While the daily miner revenues have climbed this week, we see that fees collected have declined massively this week. With the high number of blocks produced, there has been little competition to get transactions included in the blocks, and hence low fees.