Bitcoin (BTC) mining challenge is becoming nearer to the 17 T zone, as it worked up again-meaning, Bitcoin miners’ output just got slightly more complex, while they’re consuming more of their coins.
Bitcoin mining difficulty, or the standard of how hard it is to struggle for mining compensations, went up by 0.59%, but that was not sufficient to push it over the 17 T level, raising the difficulty to 16.95 T.
Though an achievement, this is not a different all-time high, as that recognition belongs to 17.35 T, which the Cryptoverse noticed two adjustments, or almost a month ago. It implies that today’s is still the second-largest BTC mining difficulty in its records.
It happens after a small drop detected throughout the previous adjustment, in late July, that hurt the difficulty back a bit, to the 16 T level.
Simultaneously, the hashrate (the computational power of the network) has been rising as well. Looking at the 7-day moving average, we notice a slight drop since the previous adjustment, of 0.43%, indicating that the hashrate is nearly constant in that past two weeks.
The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is modified every two weeks (or more precisely, every 2016 blocks) to manage the reasonable 10-minute block time. As claimed by BitInfoCharts.com, it has been going between 9 and 11 minutes following the previous adjustment, exceeding 10 minutes yesterday.
Meantime, miners have been consuming more of their BTC than it was created, especially a week ago, when 755 coins more were spent than generated, while the price of bitcoin progressed by 4% in the past week and hit USD 12,000 on Monday before adjusting lower again.
As announced, amidst the inner turmoil and a long-standing dispute between its co-founders, major hardware maker Bitmain recently postponed shipment of its famous AntMiner mining machines, citing “external interference over the company’s management.” The clients (who had to preorder their mining machines) were originally assumed to get their equipment in June and July, but have to wait until September and October.
In a similar report, Jameson Lopp, Chief Technology Officer of US-based crypto security specialist Casa, speculated that should Beijing decide to strike the Bitcoin network, it would be “nearly impossible” for the administration to start taking authority of numerous widespread mining farms, without the rest of the world hearing about it.
It would be more obvious to attack the few mining pools inside their borders, continuing, Lopp said, adding that “at the time of writing it appears that over 70% of hashpower is being coordinated through fewer than 10 mining pools that are located in China.” Nonetheless, miners can very effortlessly switch off the mining equipment, so “again it shifts a question of being able to perform an attack covertly,” and this is, as said, reasonably unlikely.
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