Bitcoin’s mining difficulty edged down 0.5% in the two weeks through Sunday after hitting an all-time high in the previous adjustment, according to data from BTC.com. The difficulty changes roughly every two weeks, and is a measure of how much computing power is used for mining bitcoin blocks to be rewarded with Bitcoins.

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Fast facts

  • The mining difficulty reading came in at 39.16 trillion at block height 776,160 in Sunday’s biweekly adjustment, following a 4.68% rise in the previous adjustment on Jan. 29.
  • The latest Bitcoin mining difficulty reading was 46.7% higher than that on Feb. 4 of last year, when the difficulty reading was at 26.69 trillion.
  • Bitcoin’s hashrate, a measure of computational power used by miners, was at around 315.9 exahashes per second on Sunday, slightly up from 311 exahashes on Jan. 29, BTC.com data showed.
  • Bitcoin’s price slid 0.3% over the last 24 hours to trade at US$21,744 at 10:40 a.m. in Hong Kong, for a decline of 5.34% over the past seven days, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The largest coin by market capitalization rose 9.2% over the past month.
  • The profitability rate of Bitcoin mining stood at US$0.0729 per terahash per second in the past 24 hours, down from US$0.184 from a year ago, data from BitInfoCharts showed.

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