Bitcoin mining difficulty climbed 3.6% on Sept. 11 to reach an all-time high of 92.67 trillion.
CryptoQuant showed that the increase comes as miner profitability continues declining, further putting pressure on the firms struggling since April’s halving event.
Bitcoin mining difficulty
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty adjusts every two weeks after the completion of 2,016 blocks, designed to ensure stable block discovery times.
When the difficulty rises, miners need more computational power to mine each block. This increase typically indicates more miners joining the network, raising the overall workload. A higher difficulty also strengthens the blockchain, increasing the energy required for network attacks.
Alongside this, Bitcoin’s hash rate is climbing steadily, averaging 693 exahashes per second (EH/s) based on a seven-day moving average.
The hash rate measures miners’ computational power to process transactions and mine BTC. It shows how many calculations mining equipment performs per second to solve the mathematical problems necessary to validate transactions and add new blocks to the blockchain.
Hashprice decline
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s hashprice, a measure of miner revenue, fell to a record low of less than $40 per petahash, according to Hashrate Index data.
Hashprice estimates how much miners earn based on the computational power used for mining.
Digital Mining Solutions founder Nico Smid stated:
“Hashprice tried rebounding but was pushed back down to its historic lows by the difficulty adjustment.”
Meanwhile, the continued decline may spell disaster for many mining operations, especially those already operating at a loss since the April halving, which reduced their rewards to 3.125 BTC from 6.25 BTC.
This has led to some miners diversifying their operations to include providing services for AI companies. However, Luxor Technology noted that Fractal Bitcoin, a scaling solution native to Bitcoin, could offer miners an additional $1.41 in revenue per PH/s/day.
It stated:
“The coinbase reward on Fractal is 25 coins for each block. And as of now, the market is pricing in ~$15 FB coin value. So, the total dollar value of FB coins available for Bitcoin miners per day is 960 blocks x 25 FB x $15 = $360,000.”