In brief

  • Bitcoin mining has become 6% more difficult to mine.
  • That follows two months of mining easing as Chinese miners went offline.

Bitcoin’s difficulty level, a measurement of how difficult it is to mine the cryptocurrency, increased by 6% today in its latest fortnightly change, according to data on BTC.com.

It’s the first positive adjustment since the crypto crash began in May. The crash, hastened by anti-Bitcoin mining regulation from China, led to four consecutive difficulty drops.

Bitcoin mining difficulty measures how much computer power is required to earn Bitcoin from validating transactions on the network.

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The network adjusts the difficulty once a fortnight to reflect competition among miners. The more miners trying to earn Bitcoin, the more difficult mining Bitcoin becomes.

Difficulty peaked in mid-May, when the fortnightly adjustment increased the difficulty level by 21.53%, a record high. But since then, Bitcoin’s difficulty rate has been on a downward spiral.

Difficulty decreased in June and July after Chinese miners, which were responsible for an estimated 65% of the network’s hash rate, emigrated en masse or sold mining machines to foreign farms after China launched a campaign to curtail Bitcoin mining in the country.

On July 3, Bitcoin recorded the largest difficulty drop ever on July 3, when it fell by 28%. In the following adjustment on July 18, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell by a further 4.81%.

Ben Gagnon, chief mining officer at Toronto-based Bitfarms, told Decrypt at the time that on-chain data indicates nearly all the Chinese hashrate had come offline.

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Today’s positive adjustment indicates that some of those machines have recently come back online.

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