Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped 2.14% on Wednesday, after reaching an all-time high in the previous adjustment on Sept. 14, according to data from BTC.com.
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Fast facts
- The mining difficulty reading, which marked the first decline in about two months, was at 31.36 trillion, as of block height 756,000, the data showed.
- The difficulty level, which changes about every two weeks, had been on the rise since its Aug. 4 adjustment. It rose to an all-time high of 32.05 trillion on Sept. 14.
- Bitcoin mining difficulty is a measure of how hard a miner has to work to verify transactions in a block to add to the blockchain, or “dig out” Bitcoins.
- Such mining difficulty adjustments are highly correlated to changes in the mining hashrate – the level of computing power used for mining.
- Bitcoin’s seven-day average hashrate was at around 222.1 exahashes per second on Wednesday, down from a seven-day average of 231.1 exahashes on Sept. 14 when the previous difficulty adjustment occurred, Blockchain.com data showed.
- Bitcoin was trading at US$19,345 at 3:20 p.m. on Thursday in Hong Kong, up 3.5% in the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
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