BTC Difficulty Hits All-Time High and Adjusts Positively for 8th Consecutive Time
New records continue to be set in the bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem, which saw the mining difficulty adjustment rise to a new all-time high of 110.45T (trillion).
The difficulty adjustment adjusts every 2,016 blocks and calibrates to ensure that blocks are mined on average every 10 minutes.
This is now the eighth positive difficulty adjustment in a row, putting more pressure on miners as the industry becomes more cutthroat and harder to mine a block to receive bitcoin rewards.
This is one of the reasons why some of the publicly traded miners have moved into the high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) industries because they cannot survive by mining bitcoin alone. For example, we saw MARA Holdings (MARA) issue convertible bonds to buy bitcoin. Apart from optimizing MARA’s income by lending their bitcoin to earn single digit yield.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen multiple positive adjustments in a row. We have seen these types of records in the past, in the summer of 2021, shortly after China’s mining ban, where the hashrate fell by around 50%.
Shortly after this event, from July to November 2021, the difficulty put in nine consecutive positive adjustments with the last adjustment corresponding to the top of the bull market when bitcoin hit around $69,000. Bitcoin then entered a bear market for the entirety of 2022. The last positive correction marked the 2021 high.
However, the opposite occurred in 2018, when bitcoin made 17 positive corrections since December 2017, coinciding with the top bull market when bitcoin was at $20,000. A small negative adjustment followed in July 2018, when the price was around $6,000.
The network then made six more consecutive positive adjustments before seeing multiple negative adjustments around Q4 2018, when bitcoin hit a low for the cycle at around $3,000.
No clear trend appears when bitcoin enters multiple positive consecutive adjustments, but it has indicated near cycle tops and bottoms in the past. However, it is important to note the constant strength of the hashrate, in a 7-day moving average, is at 775 EH/s, with CoinDesk research which indicates 1 zettahash per second can be reached before the next split.
