Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment
Bitcoin mining difficulty drops after strong price correction
The latest adjustment, effective at block height 731,808, reduced mining difficulty by 1.26%. In this overview, we’ll analyze the effects on mining and profitability.
Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment in numbers
The latest difficulty adjustment occurred at block height 731,808, mined on April 14. The hashrate at the time of the adjustment averaged 202.03 EH/s.
Hashrate was 1.26% lower than the 204.58 EH/s from the last change.
As a result, difficulty fell 1.26% from 28.59T to 28.23T, marking the third drop in the last four adjustments. This comes as a consequence of hashrate finding a balance point around the 200 EH/s line for the last few months.
Indeed, the total Bitcoin hashrate has ranged between 190 and 205 EH/s since January 21, recording variations under than 5% on every adjustment since then — the largest being February 17, when hashrate at the time of the difficulty change reached 200 EH/s for the first time in history.
Despite the drop, it is the first time that hashrate managed to stay above 200 EH/s for two consecutive difficulty epochs — an achievement that speaks highly of the Bitcoin mining community’s resilience, confidence and, most importantly, growth.
Difficulty adjustment effects on Bitcoin mining profitability
When bitcoin’s price reached $47,000 after the last difficulty adjustment and it seemed like it would finally break out of the $36–44K range, bears regained control.
The intense selling pressure that emerged at those levels dragged price back down the $40,000 line, and with it, mining profitability.
With such a sharp correction, little could the difficulty drop do to favor miners’ profitability.
Hashprice barely moved, rising from $0.179 to $0.182 — merely a fraction of a cent — and it’s still far from the $0.21 it had reached during the last bitcoin run.
Total miner revenue is now sitting at $37.5 million per day.
Implications of the latest difficulty adjustment
Unfortunately for miners, price action mitigated any positive effect this difficulty adjustment could have had on mining profitability.
On the other hand, hashrate growth has decelerated considerably in the last few weeks — although it is still growing, and will continue to do so as enterprise-level mining facilities keep expanding and new, more efficient mining devices are released onto the market.
Whether price action will accompany this hashrate growth remains an uncertainty. The Bitcoin community sure hopes so, not only to maintain profitability high with the increase of hashrate, but also to allow new miners with lower profit margins to join the network.
TL;DR:
- Difficulty adjustment block height: 731,808
- Date of the adjustment: 04/14/2022
- Average hashrate at the time of the adjustment: 202.03 EH/s
- Previous difficulty: 28.59T
- Current difficulty: 28.23T
- Difficulty change: -1.26%
- Miner revenue per hash per second (hashprice) after adjustment: $0.18
About Titan
Titan provides powerful services for crypto mining at scale, including the first enterprise-grade mining pool. Titan is also the builder of the Lumerin Protocol, a peer-to-peer, open-source solution that makes crypto mining hashpower a tradable, liquid financial asset, unlocking mining profitability and providing greater access to capital.
