What Is Happening in the Bitcoin Network?

Bitcoin mining difficulty has surged, increasing by 7.15% in the latest adjustment. This is the largest increase since February. After the adjustment, miner activity dropped noticeably.

Mining difficulty is automatically recalculated to keep the issuance of new bitcoins on schedule: it does not increase when miners boost activity, and vice versa.

What does "difficulty" mean in Bitcoin mining? Explained as simply as possible.

On Saturday, mining difficulty was set at 133.87 T (trillion), according to Cloverpool. This means miners need to compute approximately 134 trillion hash functions on average to mine new 3.125 BTC. The next adjustment will occur in about two weeks.

After the difficulty increase over the past weekend, miner activity declined. This is indicated by a drop in the global hashrate (the total power of all devices actively mining Bitcoin). Over the past 24 hours, the average hashrate was 805 Eh/s (exahashes per second), while the weekly average was 990 Eh/s (23% higher).

Earlier, JPMorgan analysts estimated the production cost of one Bitcoin at $78,000. The cryptocurrency's price has been below this level for several months, and some miners have started shutting down equipment when difficulty rises due to higher costs, and turning it back on when difficulty falls. As of June 29, BTC is trading around $60,000.

Currently, the largest contributor to the global hashrate is the US-based pool Foundry USA, with a share of nearly 25%. It is followed by AntPool (19.5%), F2Pool (12.4%), SpiderPool (10.8%), and ViaBTC (7.5%).

The "hash price" is about $28.2 per 1 Ph/s. This indicator reflects miners' daily revenue per unit of hashrate and is expressed in US dollars per petahash per second per day ($/PH/s/day). It is an average value that does not account for regional cost differences, but it still serves as an important benchmark.

At the beginning of the year, the "hash price" was $37, but has since fallen by 24%. Bitcoin has dropped by 32% over the same period. The difference is explained by the fact that mining difficulty has decreased by 8.6% over the past six months.