Bitcoin Mining Difficulty To Rise For 7th Straight Adjustment Wednesday

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.

Bitcoin Difficulty Will Reach A New ATH On Wednesday

The “Difficulty” is a feature built into the Bitcoin blockchain that controls how hard the miners would find it to mine blocks. The metric’s value changes about every two weeks in network “adjustments.”

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.

The pseudonymous Bitcoin creator integrated one simple rule for the blockchain to follow: keep block time (that is, the average time it takes miners to find a block) consistent around 10 minutes. Satoshi added this feature to make sure that the growth in BTC’s supply, which happens every time miners receive block subsidy as compensation for mining a block, remains consistent.

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.

In the last six adjustments, the network has raised its Difficulty, suggesting miners have continued to be faster than needed, as data from CoinWarz shows.

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.

This adjustment would take the indicator to a new ATH of 149.83 trillion hashes, extending the streak of jumps to seven. The seemingly never-ending run of Difficulty increases is a direct consequence of the relentless expansion that miners have recently been participating in, as the below chart from Blockchain.com shows.

The 7-day average value of the Bitcoin Hashrate, a metric that tracks the total amount of computing power that miners have connected to the network, has been exploring new records for a while now. Miners have been leveraging the extra computing resources to continue to pump out blocks at extraordinary rates.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $113,500, up 1.6% over the last week.