Data shows the Bitcoin Difficulty is set to see a jump of around 5% in the coming network adjustment, making miners’ job tougher than ever before.
Supply-demand dynamics guide that this would tank the cryptocurrency’s value. Thus, to prevent inflation running out of hand, Satoshi programmed the Difficulty. Whenever miners become faster than the network intends (by raising their computing power), the Difficulty automatically goes up just enough to slow the validators down to the standard rate.
The target block time for the Bitcoin network is 10 minutes. As the data below shows, miners have been going through blocks at an average time faster than this recently.
Bitcoin miners have been taking an average of 9.52 minutes per block recently, which is significantly faster than needed. As such, the blockchain is estimated to respond with a rather large Difficulty increase of about 5.1%.
The BTC network adjusts its Difficulty about every two weeks, with the next such event estimated to occur around 4:25 AM UTC, Friday. Once the increase goes through, the Difficulty will spike to a new all-time high (ATH) of around 136.29 terahashes.
Miners will face this pressure after already dealing with record-high Difficulty levels for the last few weeks.
It now remains to be seen whether miners will continue to expand even after the upcoming Difficulty spike or if they will roll back in the coming days.
Bitcoin recovered above $112,000 on Wednesday, but it appears the coin has seen a retrace since then as its price is now back at $110,700.
