Bitcoin Network Sees Slight Decline in Difficulty After Record High – Mining Bitcoin news

The difficulty of Bitcoin down 0.49% on February 12, 2023 after a prolonged all-time high from 39.35 trillion in the previous two weeks (2,016 blocks). The decline in difficulty offers bitcoin miners a brief breather after the network posted a 14.94% surge over the past month.

Bitcoin Difficulty Drops 0.49% Lower; Top five mining pools continue to dominate the majority of global hashrate

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s hashrate is rolling in at 289.14 exahashes per second (EH/s) after a 0.49% drop in difficulty at block height 776,160. The network difficulty was about 39,350,942,467,772 hashes for the last 2,016 blocks or two weeks. With the recent 0.49% reduction in difficulty, the network’s difficulty is now set at 39.16 trillion hashes for the next two weeks.

Since the last difficulty change, block times – the intervals between mined blocks – have ranged from 10 minutes, 7 seconds to approximately 11 minutes, 14 seconds. The next Bitcoin Difficulty Retargeting is scheduled for around February 26, 2023. The average hashrate over the last 2,016 blocks was approximately 280.6 exahashes per second (EH/s), and the average block time for those blocks was 10 minutes, 2 seconds.

For the past three days, Foundry USA has been the top mining pool with 33.26% of the global hashrate, or about 95.89 exahash per second (EH/s) hashpower. Foundry is followed by Antpool with 15.97% of the global hashrate and Binance Pool with 15.54% of the computing power. F2pool (14.22%) and Viabtc (9.41%) are the next ones. There are about 12 known mining pools today, and the five largest control 88.4% of the global hashrate.

According to macromicro.me statistics, the cost of producing Bitcoin (BTC) remains higher than the current spot market value. Macromicro.me calculates its estimates based on data on power consumption and daily bitcoin issuance provided by Cambridge University. Currently, the average cost to mine a single bitcoin is around $24,119, while its spot market value is around $21,901 per unit.

What impact will the recent drop in difficulty have on the future of bitcoin mining and the distribution of hash power among mining pools over the next two weeks? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is the news director at Bitcoin.com News and a Florida-based financial technology journalist. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for bitcoin, open source code and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about today’s emerging disruptive protocols.

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