Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Sees Sharpest Decline of the year
Bitcoin [BTC] mining difficulty took a sharp decline last weekend after a significant fall in the cryptocurrency network’s hash rate. This marked the largest decline in the difficulty figure this year.
According to the latest stats on the same show that Bitcoin’s mining difficulty had adjusted to 21.05 trillion at a block height of 685,440. This essentially means a fall of 16% since its recently established record high on the 13th of May, which happened to be the last mining date.
Accompanying this was the network’s average block production interval which had already taken off to 11.8 minutes 13-21st of this month. Interestingly, this coincided with China’s regulatory watchdogs iterating its previous stance on Bitcoin mining as well as trading activities where it spoke about the necessity for a crackdown of the same in the country.
China and Bitcoin Mining Difficulty
Bitcoin’s network adjusts the difficulty every 2016 block or nearly once every two weeks so that it can exhibit the level of competition between miners of the blockchain. The biggest downward adjustment of the year suggested that the computational effort it takes to mine BTC was less. In short, less competition.
It is important to note that more than 75% of Bitcoin miners that confirm network transactions are based in China. However, a major blow to space was when the Chinese government called for a crackdown on “illegal” securities activities, that included cryptocurrency mining and trading citing risks on the financial stability of the country.
This news was followed by severe bloodshed in the cryptocurrency market that was already struggling after Elon Musk’s announcement of halting BTC payments for Tesla.
Moreover, many crypto mining firms and exchanges began to halt their operations in the country. Huobi, the world’s second-largest crypto exchange by volume was among the first ones to suspend BTC mining services as well the sale of mining equipment.
Following the suit was the popular mining pool, BTC.TOP, a mining pool that soon announced the suspension of its operations in China citing regulatory concerns.
Published at Mon, 31 May 2021 15:55:00 +0000
