With less than two days left, it appears that the difficulty of the bitcoin (BTC) network will rise once more for miners. The next adjustment in Bitcoin’s difficulty is expected to occur on or around October 23, 2022, fewer than two days from the current all-time high (ATH) of 35.61 trillion.
While the ATH makes it much harder for bitcoin miners to get a block subsidy, they nevertheless contribute a significant amount of hashrate to the network security of the top crypto currency. According to today’s coinwarz.com statistics, BTC’s total hourly hashrate ranged between 290 and 315 EH/s.
The value is just below the total hashrate ATH at block height 758,138 that was recorded on October 11. The total network hashrate peaked at 325.11 EH/s at that time, setting a lifetime high.
A few data points indicate that the current block times on Friday have been between 8:30 minutes and 9:35 minutes, which is also less than the ten-minute average. Typically, the re-target date is shorter than two weeks when the 2,016 blocks are located more quickly than the ten-minute average.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty May Rise
When this pattern emerges, the mining difficulty of the blockchain network will rise, making it more difficult for miners to discover a BTC block. The protocol was designed in this fashion by Satoshi in order to maintain average block times of ten minutes.
The difficulty is predicted to increase from the current 35.61 trillion by 4.03% to 4.6% as of the time of writing. The anticipated percentage rise would increase the mining difficulty of BTC to a range of 37 trillion.
Currently, Foundry USA, the biggest mining pool, has allocated an average of 63.34 EH/s to the BTC chain during the last three days. Around 23.86% of the network’s total processing power is used by Foundry’s hashrate.
In terms of the top five hashers, Foundry is followed by miners like Antpool (48.37 EH/s), F2pool (39.73 EH/s), Binance Pool (35.13 EH/s), and Viabtc (23.03 EH/s). The BTC chain presently receives hashrate from 13 recognized mining pools, while 12.09 EH/s, or 4.56% of the network, is in the control of unidentified miners.
