It hasn’t been this easy to mine Bitcoin since last January. Bitcoin’s difficulty level, which determines how difficult it is to mine the cryptocurrency, fell by a further 4.81% today in its latest fortnightly drop, according to data on BTC.com.
To clarify: it’s easier to mine Bitcoin pretty much anywhere but China, where it has become decidedly more difficult after the government cracked down on the industry, forcing miners out of the country and plummeting the hash rate.
China’s crackdown, which began in June, has sunk the difficulty level by about 7.5 trillion points. On May 30, before the regulatory blitz, Bitcoin mining had a difficulty score of 21.05 trillion. Then it fell four consecutive times (the worst ever streak) to its current score, 13.67 trillion.
The Bitcoin network calculates how difficult it is to mine Bitcoin—how much computational power is required to earn Bitcoin—according to the supply and demand of miners. The fewer miners online, the easier mining Bitcoin becomes.
This latest correction is less than a fifth of the performance drop-off of the previous one. Between June 13 and July 3 this year, Bitcoin logged a 28% plunge in mining difficulty after a huge swathe of Chinese miners were taken offline.
On June 9, China’s Xinjiang province issued shutdown orders to several Bitcoin miners. Nine days later, Sichuan’s Ya’an municipality shut down a further 26 mining farms. The shutdowns plummeted Bitcoin’s hash rate by 17%.
The difficulty of Bitcoin mining was lowered by 4.81%, the fourth consecutive drop, and the difficulty hit a new low since January 2020. pic.twitter.com/3ruvXBETqp
According to the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance, China still accounts for 46.04% of Bitcoin’s monthly hash rate. That’s down 20% since April.
At the end of June, Bitcoin’s hash rate started rising again. Throughout July so far, the hash rate has recovered 20%, according to Blockchain.com.
I'm noticing very few people noticing the #Bitcoin hash rate is casually up ~20% in the first two weeks of July.
I've never apologized for making myself rich, and I never will because of moments like this when degen winners leverage buy and losers don't. pic.twitter.com/UbSZb6gBsz
Bitcoiners may have had to weather the storm coming from China but the network is beginning to slowly bounce back. While today’s hash rate of 101.6 EH/s is still 99 EH/s off the network’s former all-time high set on May 14 this year, it looks like Bitcoin miners have survived the worst.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Crypto exchange Kraken is willing to hit some pretty tight deadlines, as the exchange works to elevate its brand and market share through a new business solution dubbed Kraken Embed, according to the company’s Head of Payments and Blockchain Brett McLain.
In an interview with Decrypt, McLain said that Kraken’s recent tie-up with bunq, a Netherlands-based neobank, was the result of a last-minute shift—and a blueprint for how the company could expand its presence through relationships with similar...
Public Keys is a weekly roundup from Decrypt that tracks the key publicly traded crypto companies. This week:
Choppy week for Coinbase
Coinbase flagged a $400 million cybersecurity breach this week—one of the biggest in the company’s history. The most troubling aspect is that the exploit arose because an overseas contractor was bribed to steal customer data.
In a video posted online, CEO Brian Armstrong said that criminals were able to gain access to sensitive user data, including names, addres...
Hong Kong investment group Avenir snapped up another 3.4 million shares of BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) during the first quarter, bringing its holdings of the fund to nearly $700 million, according to a U.S. regulatory filing published Thursday—further evidence that spot Bitcoin ETFs are gaining traction among financial institutions.
Avenir held 14.7 million IBIT shares worth $688 million as of March 31, according to its filing,. That marks a 30% increase from the firm's IBIT ho...