Bitcoin Network's Mining Difficulty Sees Largest Epoch Drop Since 2011

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty saw the second-largest drop in history on Tuesday, as the difficulty dropped to 16.78 trillion, losing a touch over 16% since last week’s all-time difficulty high. The last time bitcoin’s mining difficulty dropped so low was in October 2011, when it lost around 18%. Since the large difficulty drop took place, the overall SHA256 hashrate increased a great deal after losing 40% during the last week of October.

The Bitcoin (BTC) network saw a significant mining difficulty drop on Tuesday when it slid -16.05% to 16.78t. News.Bitcoin.com reported last week on how the network’s SHA256 hashrate plunged around 40% to roughly 90 exahash per second.

Following Tuesday’s difficulty drop, BTC’s hashrate has increased a great deal, spiking to 114 EH/s on November 3, after touching 97 EH/s during the earliest hours on Tuesday morning. BTC’s hashrate is hovering just above the 100 EH/s handle at 107 EH/s at the time of publication.

Mining difficulty essentially is the relative measurement of the amount of resources needed to find bitcoin blocks on a given day. It gives people an idea of how difficult it is to mine a new block. Bitcoin’s difficulty changes using 2,016 block epochs or two-week intervals.

When the hashrate is extremely high, the difficulty will grow more difficult during the change and if the total estimated hashrate has drops it becomes easier to mine bitcoin. With the hashrate at current speeds today, estimates show another -16% drop on the horizon.

Data from Btc.com on Tuesday indicates the next change is more than 14 days away and estimates show it may drop down to 14.05t, losing -16.3% if it comes to fruition. Today, on November 3, there are 16 mining operations dedicating hashrate to the Bitcoin (BTC) network.

F2pool leads the pack of pools with roughly 18.7% of the network with over 20 EH/s under the hood. This is followed by operations like Poolin (15.5 EH/s), Btc.com (12.4 EH/s). Huobi (12.4 EH/s), and Antpool (11.7 EH/s). With 107 EH/s dedicated to the BTC chain, the five aforementioned pools combined capture 67.28% of the overall hashrate.

At press time, the mempool clog has dropped a hair after the backlog saw over 100k unconfirmed transactions during the course of last week and into the weekend. However, data shows the mempool still has around 73k unconfirmed transactions on Tuesday.