Bitcoin’s Mining Difficulty Continues to Rise: 37% More Difficult to Mine BTC Than 3 Months Ago, Difficulty Nears 20 Trillion

Bitcoin’s hashrate has been climbing steadily over the last three months and rose more than 40% after the network’s hashpower was below 90 exahash per second (EH/s) on July 5. The trend has led to a consecutive run of five bitcoin mining difficulty accruals with another increase expected during the next transition.

Hashrate Steadily Increases, Antpool Commands Top Position, Unknown Hashrate Returns

The overall Bitcoin (BTC) hashrate has been slowly but steadily rising higher during the last 90 days. The network’s current processing power is coasting along at 130 EH/s, and three months ago the hashpower was 40% lower than today.

In the last 24 hours, Antpool has been the top mining pool dedicating hashrate to the BTC network with 29.7 EH/s or 20.47% of the global hashrate. Antpool is followed by F2pool with 23.58 EH/s or 16.2% of BTC’s overall hashrate, and Pooling captures 13.2% of the network or 19.2 EH/s.

Other top pools dedicating vast amounts of hashrate to the BTC network include operations such as Viabtc, Foundry USA, and Btc.com, respectively. While Bitcoin.com News reported that the quantity of unknown hashrate had disappeared during the last hashrate report, a small fraction of stealth mining has recently returned. 1.86 EH/s or 1.28% of the global hashrate currently belongs to unknown mining entities.

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Expected to Increase for 6th Time in a Row

As BTC’s hashrate has increased and mining pools have been shuffling around, the network’s mining difficulty is expected to increase for the sixth time in a row. At the time of writing, it is expected to increase by 2.99% to 19.57 trillion, getting awfully close to the 20 trillion mark. Currently, BTC’s mining difficulty is 19.00 trillion. A 2.99% increase will mean it will be 37% more difficult to mine bitcoin than it was on July 30.

The upcoming increase is similar in size to the difficulty increase two weeks ago which was roughly 3.16%. The biggest jump in the consecutive run of difficulty rises was on August 25, at block height 697,536, when the difficulty jumped approximately 13.24%. The consecutive run of mining difficulty increases follows the run of five consecutive difficulty adjustment algorithm decreases.