Six days ago, after the network difficulty change on September 27, bitcoin hash rates broke the 295 exahash/s (EH/s) level twice in the first two days of October. Currently, the network is coasting at 229 EH/s, with block intervals faster than the 10-minute average, so it is likely that the difficulty level will be adjusted upward again. With Bitcoin mining difficulty about to reach an all-time high (ATH) again, the network hash rate has increased exponentially from 6 million hashes per second to the recent 2905 trillion hashes per second.
Bitcoin’s network hash rate and difficulty continues to rise
Bitcoin’s computational power is much stronger than it was 13 years ago. Network mining difficulty just recently reached an all-time high on September 13, 2022 with a block height of 753,984.
The height reached by the mining difficulty is approximately 32.5 trillion hashes, and the network is likely to be revised upward around October 11, 2022. According to statistics, the difficulty retarget could be anywhere from4.22%up to10.7%.
Miners continue to increase their hashing power despite the declining USD exchange rate for Bitcoin (BTC) and its near ATH difficulty. In fact, there is no other computational network today that has increased exponentially at the rate at which the hash rate of the Bitcoin network has increased over the past decade.
On January 19, 2009, the bitcoin hash rate was about 6 million hashes per second (6,290,000,000), which, using the recent 295EH/s record, equals 29 billion hashes per second (295,000,000,000,000). From these two data sets, we can see that the network hash rate has increased by 4 trillion percent over the past 13 years.
The current block time is 9 minutes 1 second at the time of writing, below the 10-minute average; on October 1, 2022, the time between blocks will be even faster. Difficulty adjustments are much more frequent than in the early years (pre-2010), once every two weeks.
Difficulty did not exceed one hash until February 2, 2010, or a block height of 40,320, and on September 18, 2017, with a block height of 485,856, bitcoin network difficulty exceeded one trillion hashes for the first time.
Like the hash rate, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has also increased exponentially, rising 3 trillion percent since February 2, 2010, or over the past 4626 days. As of this writing, more than 756,888 bitcoin blocks have been mined, with 1,831,949.98BTCremaining to be mined;
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