Bitcoin difficulty rises 4.68%, hits new all-time high; metric set to cross 40 trillion
Bitcoin difficulty reached an all-time high or even an all-time high on Sunday, surging 4.68%, surpassing the record set two weeks ago. The increase occurred at 6:10 am (UTC) at block height 774,144. The difficulty now stands at 39.35 trillion, looks close to crossing 40 trillion and the next adjustment is due on 11 February 2023. The increase makes mining blocks more difficult, with a jump of 4.68% after a 10.26% increase on 15 Jan 2023. Data from January 29 shows that 279.7 exahashes per second (EH/s) of the last 2016 blocks show a hash rate, with 283.55 EH/s currently dedicated to the bitcoin blockchain. On January 28, macromicro.me estimated the cost of production of bitcoin at $21,176 per unit. The spot price on January 29 was $23,584. With prices higher than the cost of production bitcoin miners have recouped some losses since late 2022 and the calculated pool distribution of discovered blocks shows Foundry USA as the top mining pool with 101.47 EH/s, Which is equal to 34.89% of the hashpower of the network. Antpool owns 57.54 EH/s or 19.79% of the total network hash rate. F2pool, Binance Pool, Viabtc, Btc.com and Brains Pool follow Foundry and Antpool respectively. Of course with increasing difficulty is the time between each BTC block on the block interval. It’s been about 9:02 to 9:38 minutes. That’s slower than the 8:54 to 9:31 minutes recorded two days ago, but still faster than the 10-minute average.
