Work is about to become harder for Bitcoin (BTC) miners, as mining difficulty is set for another all-time high (ATH) in a matter of hours, which will be the second one in a row, once again cutting into the already decreasing profit margins of miners.
The Bitcoin mining difficulty, or the measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, is gearing up to skip over the 30 T level and go straight to 31.37 T, thanks to a 5.29% increase, per an estimation by the mining pool BTC.com.
This rise follows a nearly 5.6% increase seen two weeks ago when the difficulty reached the 29 T range for the first time in the network’s history.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin hashrate, or the computational power of the network, has remained almost unchanged.
In the same time period, however, Bitcoin mining profitability saw a much larger drop, falling nearly 13%. Over the past 14 days, the price of BTC went down 23%. The price went from about USD 39,390 seen on April 27 to the current (15:39 UTC) USD 31,315.
The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is adjusted around every two weeks (or more precisely, every 2016 blocks) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. The 7-day moving average block time on May 9 was 9.63 minutes.
According to data provided by ByteTree, over the past weeks, miners have spent significantly more of their newly generated BTC than they held.
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