Bitcoin’s mining difficulty, on Sunday, hit a new all-time high, rising roughly 4.68% from 37.59 trillion to 39.35 trillion.
By industry standards, mining difficulty is the figure that represents the computational power required to mine a single BTC. It’s updated roughly every two weeks. It gets more difficult as more miners enter the network and easier when they leave.
Mining difficulty has been rising strongly and steadily over the past year, despite temporary decreases, such as in the month of December 2022.
At the time of writing, the mining difficulty sat at 26.24 EH/s as per the data from CoinWarz, but it has since risen to 39.35 EH/s, a roughly 50% increase.
Bitcoin’s hash rate which measures the amount of computational power dedicated to mining the cryptocurrency currently sits at 305.81 ExaHashes per second (EH/s).
This figure is still below the all-time high registered on January 6 of 348.7 EH/S.
The current hash rate means Bitcoin miners are currently making over 305 quintillion codebreaking attempts every second in attempts to solve the computational equations needed to produce the proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency.