Bitcoin’s mining difficulty level rose 1.72% on Thursday, hitting a record high, while the network’s hashrate increased, showing miners are applying more computing power. The difficulty changes roughly every two weeks, and is a measure of how much computing power is required for mining blocks to be rewarded with Bitcoin.
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Fast facts
- The mining difficulty reading came in at 48.71 trillion at block height 786,240 in Thursday’s adjustment, following a 2.23% rise in the previous adjustment on April 6, according to data from BTC.com. The difficulty level has been on the rise since February 25 in the last five adjustments.
- Bitcoin’s hashrate, a measure of computational power used by miners, was at around 355.4 exahashes per second on Wednesday, up from 338.3 exahashes on April 6, data from Blockchain.com showed.
- Bitcoin’s price dipped 1.94% over the last 24 hours to trade at US$28,284 at 11:30 a.m. in Hong Kong, and fell 7.83% over the past seven days, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The largest coin by market capitalization traded at around US$28,100 on April 6, and has risen over 70% so far this year.
- The profitability rate of Bitcoin mining stood at US$0.0646 per terahash per second in the past 24 hours, down from US$0.2 from a year ago, data from BitInfoCharts showed.
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