Due to the falling bitcoin (BTC) price, BTC miners have been having a hard time for a while. Profitability is declining and in many cases they are forced to sell some of their bitcoins. An automatic mechanism of the network now brings some relief to the miners.
Bitcoin difficulty
Last night the new difficulty adjustment implemented. This automatic mechanism is activated every 2016 and should ensure that transaction blocks are added to the blockchain on average every 10 minutes.
The main purpose of this is to ensure that the network remains stable and predictable. If it takes an average of more than 10 minutes during the period of 2016 transaction blocks before a block is added to the blockchain, the difficulty decreases. If transaction blocks are added too quickly, the difficulty increases.
It’s now easier to mine bitcoins
With decreasing difficulty, it becomes easier for miners to add blocks to the blockchain and thus mine bitcoins. Last night the most recent difficulty adjustment took place. Due to a slight decrease in the total computing power of miners, probably due to the market situation, the difficulty decreased by 2.35%. That appears from dates from BTC.com.
The previous adjustment was still positive. Two weeks ago, it became 1.3% more difficult to mine bitcoins after the average computing power during that period was higher than the previous one. But now that more and more models of bitcoin miners are no longer profitable, they are being turned off. And so the computing power has declined slightly over the past two weeks.
How miners deal with the current situation in which the bitcoin price has fallen sharply differs from company to company. For example, the listed miner Marathon Digital recently announced that it is holding its BTC firmly. However, the daily bitcoin update stated that bitcoin mining pool (a group of individual bitcoin miners) sent 5,000 bitcoins to Binance. It is likely that the pool will sell these bitcoins to cover the costs.
