The Bitcoin network is set to record another meaningful difficulty increase on Sunday, January 29, 2023, as current expectations are for it to rise 3.82% higher. This change follows the previous difficulty re-standardization, which advanced 10.26% to the current all-time high of 37.59 trillion.
Block Time Breakdown. How Faster Discovery Will Affect Bitcoin Difficulty
According to current estimates, in just one day, the bitcoin network will see an increase in difficulty of about 3.82%. Right now, mining difficulty is already at an all-time high (ATH) of 37.59 trillion, a 3.82% jumpinis expected to be around $39.30 trillion. The number of hashes required to mine a block is directly proportional to the difficulty level, meaning that each participating miner would need to perform 39.3 trillion hashes to mine a block of that level.
Bitcoin’s average block time is lower than the 10-minute average , and is trending to . This also has a linear relationship with the estimated increase expected on January 29.
This is because when blocks are discovered faster than the 10-minute average, the 2,016 blocks during the difficulty restandardization are also discovered faster than the two-week average. As a result, the mining difficulty of the Bitcoin protocol increases.29} With the higher price of BTC, more hash rates are dedicated to the blockchain.
Bitcoin hash rates have remained high, averaging 278.2 exahashes per second (EH/s) during the last 2,016 blocks.Foundry USA occupies thetop positionin the mining pool with the highest hash rate dedicated to SHA256. with Foundry at approximately 93.82 EH/s over the three-day period, which represents 32.99% of the network’s computing capacity. Bitcoin mining pool Antpool dedicated 49.57 EH/s to the Bitcoin network over a three-day span, accounting for 17.43% of the hashing power.
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