on the crypto
Bitcoin has just become easier to mine. At the height of the 633.024 block, reached Thursday 4 June at 12:30 UTC, the Bitcoin blockchain adjusted its mining difficulty to 13,7 trillion with a drop of 9,29% and reached the lowest level since January of this year.
The effects of halving
Thursday's update follows a 6% drop seen on May 20, which was the first calculation of the network's difficulty after the Bitcoin reward halved event. Halving reduced the mining premiums by 12,5 bitcoins ( BTC) per block at 6,25 units.
The event also cut out those operators who operated older and less efficient equipment that could no longer return a profit. Miners who survived thanks to the possibility of using low-cost electricity and more cutting-edge equipment will see the update today as good news, as the drop in mining difficulty means that bitcoin has become easier to mine.
The Chinese rainy season is making itself felt
But although the difficulty has lessened, the hashrate (or total computing power) on the network has grown in the past week when miners started turning on the new machines shipped before the rainy season in China. Bitmain and MicroBT, the two main Chinese mining equipment manufacturers, sent their more efficient ASIC miners such as AntMiner S19 and WhatsMiner M30S in May.
Meanwhile, the Chinese monsoon is lowering the cost of hydroelectricity in the country's southwestern region to $ 0,03 per kilowatt hour (kWh). With that rate, even older mining equipment such as AntMiner S9s can still operate with profits at the current price and level of difficulty of bitcoin.
Mining and hashrate difficulties
The Bitcoin network changes its mining difficulty every 2.016 blocks, approximately every two weeks, in order to maintain the average block production interval every 10 minutes. If more people join the mining team, resulting in an increasing hashrate and an average interval of less than 10 minutes, the network will automatically increase the difficulty.
Conversely, if more people disconnect from the network during any cycle, leading to a lower hashrate and longer blocking intervals, the network will lower the difficulty. Data show that the 7-day moving average of Bitcoin hashrate initially dropped to 90 exhahash per second (EH / s) around May 27 - a week after the last adjustment on May 20.
At that point, it was more than 15% lower than the rate quotation medium hash (108 EH / s) before May 20. But over the past week, total computing power has steadily risen above the 100 EH / s level.
In fact, the average block production time from May 20 to May 27 was over 12 minutes, longer than the expected 10 minute interval. Increasing the hash rate from May 27 so far has reduced the time to 11 minutes.
