BITCOIN MINING DIFFICULTY ADJUSTMENT

Bitcoin hashrate bounces after a significant drop; miners expectant on price action

Analyzing Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment and mining profitability

The latest difficulty adjustment, effective at block height 770,112, reduced mining difficulty by 3.59%. In this overview, we’ll analyze the effects on mining and profitability.

Bitcoin’s total hashrate

Hashrate dropped to 243.66 EH/s at the end of the last mining epoch. This comes after an adjustment were hashrate had made a swift recovery from the largest difficulty drop in 2022.

However, appearances may be misleading. Although difficulty has gone down, this was only a timing issue. In reality, hashrate has been growing rapidly for more than a week now, reaching levels close to all-time high.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty

Despite hashrate growing in the last days of the epoch, hashrate was still lower than that of the last epoch at the time of the adjustment. As a result, mining difficulty dropped to 34.09T. This translates to a 3.59% drop.

However, the trend seems to be moving in the opposite way, as hashrate hasn’t stopped its growth. Therefore, it’s likely difficulty will increase once again in the next adjustment.

Hashprice, or mining revenue per TH/s

Miners will be happy to know that, following the drop in difficulty and Bitcoin’s price slight tick upwards, mining revenue per TH/s increased to $0.062.

This marks a 3.33% increase from the hashprice recorded after the last difficulty adjustment ($0.06) and a 4.37% increase from this epoch’s lows ($0.059).

Although it may not seem like much, it’s still good news for miners, who got to start the year with the right foot.

Bitcoin mining profitability overview

There are both positive and negative aspects to this difficulty adjustment in terms of mining profitability.

On the bright side, the downward change will allow miners to enjoy a couple of weeks of increased profitability, even if only slight.

On the other hand, and considering the difficulty drop was a fortunate timing consequence, it’s likely that, unless Bitcoin’s price compensates, this profitability will be short lived.

The difficulty adjustment in numbers

• Difficulty adjustment block height: 770,112
• Date of the adjustment: 01/03/2023
• Average hashrate at the time of the adjustment: 243.66 EH/s
• Previous difficulty: 35.36T
• Current difficulty: 34.09T
• Difficulty change: -3.59%
• Miner revenue per TH/s (hashprice) after adjustment: $0.062