Bitcoin’s hash rate has been steadily rising over the past three months and is up more than 40% after network hash power was below 90 exahs per second (EH/s) on July 5. With another increase expected during the next transition.
Hashrate steadily increases, Antpool’s highest command center, Unknown Hashrate returns
The overall Bitcoin (BTC) hash rate has been slowly but surely rising over the last 90 days. The current network processing power is 130 EH/sec, and three months ago the hash power was 40% lower than it is today.
In the past 24 hours, Antpool was the largest hash-mining pool for the BTC network with 29.7 EH/s or 20.47% of the global hash rate. Antpool follows F2pool with 23.58 EH/s or 16.2% of the total BTC hash, and Pooling captures 13.2% of the network or 19.2 EH/s.
Other major conglomerates that allocate massive amounts of hash to the BTC network include operations such as Viabtc, Foundry USA, and Btc.com, respectively. While Bitcoin.com News reported that an unknown amount of hashes disappeared during the last hash report, a small portion of crypto mining has recently returned. 1.86 EH/s or 1.28% of the global hash rate currently belongs to unknown mining entities.
Bitcoin mining is expected to become increasingly difficult for the sixth time in a row
With the increase in BTC hash rate and the change in mining pools, the difficulty of mining the network is expected to increase for the sixth time in a row. At the time of writing, it is expected to rise 2.99% to 19.57 trillion, coming close to the 20 trillion mark. Currently, the mining difficulty of BTC is 19.00 trillion. A 2.99% increase will mean that it will be 37% more difficult to mine Bitcoin than it was on July 30.
The next increase is similar in size to the difficulty increase two weeks ago which was close to 3.16%. The biggest jump in the series of consecutive difficulty hikes was on August 25, at block height 697,536, when the difficulty jumped nearly 13.24%. The successive increase in mining difficulty follows the operation of five consecutive times of decreasing the difficulty adjustment algorithm.
What do you think of the Bitcoin hash rate this week and the upcoming mining difficulty increase? Tell us what you think about it in the comments section below.
photo credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, btc.com,
disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal or accounting advice. Neither the Company nor the author shall be liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.