On-chain data shows the Bitcoin Difficulty is set to see yet another increase in the upcoming adjustment, resulting in a new record for the metric.
The Difficulty is fully controlled by the code that Satoshi wrote in, meaning that these adjustments happen without intervention from a human or an organization.
Whenever miners become faster at their task, the BTC network responds by upping its Difficulty just enough to slow the validators back down to the standard rate. Similarly, the chain has to drop the metric’s value if miners are struggling to keep up pace.
As displayed in the above chart, five of these six previous positive adjustments all led to new all-time highs (ATHs) for the metric. This implies BTC mining has been the toughest it has ever been over the last couple of months.
It would appear, however, that even six straight Difficulty increases haven’t been enough to slow the miners down, as the network is heading toward yet another positive adjustment.
As is visible above, Bitcoin miners have produced blocks at an average time of 9.50 minutes per each since the last adjustment. This is 0.50 minutes faster than Satoshi’s optimal rate, so the chain is gearing up for a significant Difficulty increase of over 5% on Wednesday.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $113,500, up 1.6% over the last week.
