Relief to Bitcoin Miners as Difficulty Set For Largest Drop in Five Months

Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty is now estimated to drop in six days, offering relief to miners, squeezed by the market crash and the current record-high mining difficulty.

The next adjustment will see the difficulty, a measure that shows how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, go down by 5.8%, which is the largest drop seen in almost five months – since -7.10% recorded on November 8, 2019, according to major Bitcoin mining pool BTC.com estimations. Ten days ago, it estimated that the mining difficulty will climb 7% to 17.71 T during this next adjustment.

Between November and today, BTC.com recorded only two drops in difficulty, both less than 1%. Should it indeed go down as currently estimated, BTC mining difficulty will stand at 15.60 T, close to where it was in February. However, the number might be even lower, as the estimation is now being constantly revised down.

BTC mining difficulty and hashrate, or the computational power of the Bitcoin network, both hit new highs earlier in March, with the mining difficulty climbing 6.88% and finally entering the 16 T range.

Speaking of hashrate, while it went up from 110.86 EH/s to 118.40 EH/s ten days ago, it’s now standing at 99.70 EH/s, which is a 16% drop. It hasn’t been below 100 EH/s since the first day of this year.

Mining profitability has been going down as well, reaching its lowest point yet. Starting with March 6, the mining profitability has begun another dive, from USD/Day 0.152 for 1 THash/s to USD 0.0693, making it a 54% plunge.

All that said, Bitcoin miners are going through a particularly hard period, during which unprofitable ones will likely have to turn their machines off. As reported, there was a number of different elements that had contributed to the rise of hashrate and difficulty, including the new equipment rolling out and people reopening their mining farms in China as the Covid-19 outbreak has been slowed down in that country.

However, we need to keep in mind that BTC halving is just two months away, and it on its own, without anything else that’s currently happening, will already have an effect on a BTC miner’s future.
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