Bitcoin mining difficulty surged by 3.6% on September 11
Bitcoin mining difficulty surged by 3.6% on September 11, hitting an all-time high of 92.67 trillion. This increase comes amid declining miner profitability, as highlighted by CryptoQuant, which has been a growing concern for mining firms since the halving event in April.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty adjusts every two weeks after the completion of 2,016 blocks to maintain stable block discovery times. As difficulty rises, miners require more computational power to mine each block. This usually signals more miners joining the network, thereby increasing the overall workload. A higher difficulty also strengthens the Bitcoin blockchain, making it more energy-intensive to launch a network attack.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s hash rate has been steadily increasing, averaging 693 exahashes per second (EH/s) over a seven-day moving average. The hash rate measures the computational power miners use to process transactions and mine Bitcoin, reflecting the number of calculations performed per second to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to validate transactions and add blocks to the blockchain.
Decline in Hashprice
Despite the increase in mining difficulty and hash rate, Bitcoin’s hashprice—a key indicator of miner revenue—has dropped to a record low of less than $40 per petahash, according to data from Hashrate Index. Hashprice estimates how much miners earn based on the computational power they use for mining.
Nico Smid, founder of Digital Mining Solutions, commented, “Hashprice tried rebounding but was pushed back down to its historic lows by the difficulty adjustment.”
The continued decline in hashprice poses a significant challenge for many mining operations, especially those that have been struggling since April’s halving, which cut miner rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. As a result, some miners have begun diversifying their operations, offering services to AI companies to offset losses.
However, Luxor Technology pointed out that Fractal Bitcoin, a native Bitcoin scaling solution, might provide miners with an additional $1.41 per PH/s/day in revenue. According to the firm, “The coinbase reward on Fractal is 25 coins per block. With the market pricing FB coins at ~$15 each, the total value available for Bitcoin miners is 960 blocks x 25 FB x $15 = $360,000 per day.”
