coindesk.com
The difficulty of mining a bitcoin block dropped 0.35% on Thursday, the second time this month, after a consistent climb since November.
-
On March 3, mining difficulty dropped 1.5%, data from information platform Glassnode shows.
-
The difficulty adjusts automatically relative to the computing power on the network, also known as the hashrate, to keep the time between each mined block relatively stable at 10 minutes.
-
The bitcoin mining hashrate has dropped from an all-time high in February of 248 exahash/second (EH/s) to 216 EH/s on March 17, according to data from Glassnode.
-
"This slight drop is likely due to unprofitable miners unplugging ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). As energy prices increase globally, we will likely see more ASICs fall off the network," Compass Mining founder and CEO Whitt Gibbs told CoinDesk in a Telegram message on Friday.
-
Electricity prices are soaring across the world as one of the world's largest exporters of fossil fuels, Russia, is enthralled in a war with Ukraine, and global energy supply chains are being severed by sanctions.
On March 17, the bitcoin network's mining difficulty dropped for the second time this month. (Glassnode)