At block height 764 064, the Bitcoin difficulty changed on November 20, 2022. It only increased by 0.51%. However, the increase in difficulty did propel it to its lifetime high at 36.95 trillion. The network’s average hashrate over the past week has been 249.1 exahash per minute (EH/s).
The average Bitcoin network block times was slower than normal, running from 10.2 minutes to 11.06 Monday evening (ET). Block intervals are much higher than before Nov. 20’s difficulty change. Prior to Sept. 29, block times were on average under ten minutes.
Block times that are longer suggest that the 2,016 blocks that have been mined before the next retarget will take longer than the average two-weeks. Statistics indicate that the retarget could drop to 10% by Dec. 5. However, metrics from Btc.com indicate that the drop is around 6.13%.
These estimates would surpass the Bitcoin network’s largest difficulty contraction of all time, which was approximately -5.01% on July 21. The most difficult difficulty ever recorded is currently being dealt with by miners. Both bitcoin ( Bitcoin) prices have fallen 76% from the record ($69K) set on Nov. 10, 2021.
Mining insights is available from braiins.com. micromicro.me shows BTC that the cost of production ($18.360) is higher than the spot market value ($16.250). Market intelligence from Glassnode also indicates that bitcoin miners are tapping their treasuries.
Glassnode , an onchain analytics company, tweeted about the ‘immeasurable financial stress’ in the bitcoin mining industry. It also announced a Cryptoslate mining report.
Glassnode stated that he found that miners of bitcoin are distributing approximately 135% of the mined coins. This means that miners are using their 78K [bitcoin] strong Treasurys. Publicly-listed mining companies have revealed that they have been selling Bitcoin during the second half of the year to boost cash reserves and reduce debt.
Foundry USA’s three day hashrate was around 60.66 EH/s at the time of writing (ET) which is 25.45% of global hashrate. Foundry USA was the largest mining pool and mined 98 BTC blocks of the 385 that were discovered by all miners in three days.
Antpool, F2pool and Binance Pool follow Foundry’s hashrate. Viabtc follows Viabtc, Antpool, F2pool and Binance Pool. The top five mining pools discovered 315 blocks from the total 385 over the past three days between all five pools.