mining difficulty just saw its biggest rise in six months and it's estimated it'll reach an all-time high in two weeks.
Bitcoin mining difficulty, a measure showing how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, just went through another adjustment, and the numbers were close to what was estimated yesterday, but still haven't reached that far. It went up 8.45%, thus reaching 15.96 T, short of 16.55 T discussed a day ago, but more than was estimated two weeks ago (5.65%).
Also, though it dropped significantly in March, it now seems that it may be back on the road of its all-time highs. As of now, BTC mining difficulty is expected to go up another 8.32%, in which case it would reach a new all-time high of 17.29 T, according to major Bitcoin mining pool BTC.com estimations. However, this forecast will change depending on changes in hashrate, the computational power of the Bitcoin network. Should it increase further, the mining difficulty will follow. The average hashrate stands at 114.10 EH/s - highest since mid-March.
The recent difficulty adjustment makes this the measure's biggest movement upwards since September 13 last year. For the last half a year, the jumps moved between 0.52% and 7.31%. In that same time frame, there were only four drops, but with a major one, second-largest ever, occurring on March 26.
That said, Bitcoin halving is expected to happen in some three weeks, putting one more difficulty adjustment between this one and the mining reward halving event.
The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is adjusted every two weeks (every 2016 blocks, to be precise) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. This means that if there are many miners competing among themselves and propagating blocks in less than ten minutes, the difficulty of the next puzzle will be increased; if there are few miners and it takes them much longer to find a solution, the difficulty is decreased - both times just enough to keep block times at around 10 minutes.
