Bitcoin mining difficulty, a measure of how difficult it is to find a new block and add it to the blockchain, is currently estimated to increase significantly on January 15, 2023. At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty appears to be on track for a 10% increase, rising from 34.09 trillion to 37.57 trillion.
Upcoming Difficulty Retargeting to Increase Hashrate Requirements
Leading cryptocurrency network Bitcoin (BTC) is set to experience a record difficulty spike on January 15, 2023, or in about three days. At the time of writing, the network’s hash rate is 268.79 exahashes per second (EH/s), and the blockchain’s computing power reached an all-time high on January 6, 2023. At block height 770,709 that day, the network’s hash power reached 361.20 EH/s.
Bitcoin block times, also known as block intervals, ranged between 8 minutes, 52 seconds and 9 minutes, 6 seconds. The block interval is the average time it takes to add a new block to the blockchain, and the network difficulty is designed to keep the block time around 10 minutes per block.
The actual time between blocks may vary from this average, and since the last difficulty change on January 2nd, 2023 at a block height of 770,112 blocks, block intervals have become faster. For this reason, the difficulty retargeting on January 15th would be a significant increase, and would be a rise not seen since October 2022.
Foundry USA and Antpool Command Bitcoin’s global Hashrate is about half
At the time of writing and until the next difficulty change, BTC’s network difficulty is about 34.09 trillion. This means that it takes an average of 34 trillion hashes (or attempts) to find a valid BTC block and add it to the blockchain. Currently, analyst sites detail that Bitcoin’s next difficulty change is expected to increase by 10.1% to 10.21% in three days.
According to the highest estimate, the difficulty will reach an all-time high of 37.57 trillion, and bitcoin miners will have to apply 37.57 trillion hashes to find a block on the Bitcoin blockchain. Foundry USA is currently the top mining pool in the last three days with 29.57% of the global hashrate. The foundry is followed by Antpool (19.36%), F2pool (16.38%), Binance Pool (8.72%), Viabtc (8.30%) and Braiins Pool (3.40%) respectively. Between Foundry and Antpool, the two pools currently control 48.93% of the network’s total hashrate.
What do you think about Bitcoin’s upcoming mining difficulty change? Share your thoughts and predictions in the comments below.
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